You started by rejecting the "objective world", but then speak of noticing how people see the world in different ways. What's the difference between the objective world and the world? — frank

I see thanks, that was just a poor formulation on my part, when I say people "see the world in different ways", I mean to say people have their own subjective world, depending on their beliefs and perceptions. And that what many call an "objective world" is a subjective world they agree on.

In what way is it self-contradictory?

Leo talks of an "objective world". Again, I think it incumbent that he explain how an objective world differs from a world. — Banno

An objective world is a world many seem to have in mind when they say things such as Jupiter has an objective existence independently of us. In contrast, I say that anyone is subjectively involved in constructing their world through their perceptions and beliefs. That what people call an objective world is nothing more than a subjectively constructed world they have agreed on.

I know some philosophers talk this way. I think it misleading. The remainder of your post serves as an example of what happens when a philosopher talks this way. — Banno

I don't see how that is misleading. You seem used to interpret subjectivity as referring solely to feelings or tastes or thoughts, because on many occasions you have noticed that different people seem to have different feelings/tastes/thoughts. However you assume that perception is objective, in that everyone perceive the same world from their own point of view, that if you put different people in the same place they would perceive the exact same thing, but would only make different reports of what they perceive because of their different feelings/tastes/thoughts. That is a strong assumption. There are many examples where different people report having differing perceptions (seeing different colors, hearing different sounds, ...).

The root of the disagreement I see here is that you (and people agreeing with you) assume that there exists an objective world, existing independently of us, and that our perception is a window to this objective world. Whereas I (and presumably others) don't make such an assumption. I have noticed how different beliefs can make us see the world in very different ways, how believing in something make us see it exist.

To me, the objective world that you and many others assume to exist independently of us is a world that we construct in part ourselves through our beliefs. For instance, the belief that the things we have perceived exist when we're not perceiving them leads to construct a world in our mind, a world that is consistent in some ways, but then when we perceive things that don't fit into that construction we relegate them to the status of hallucination, while if we hadn't forced a specific constructed world in the first place we would consider these unconventional perceptions differently, more seriously, on the same level of reality as the others, which would give rise to a very different view of the world.

Forcing beliefs and assumptions onto our perceptions forces us to see the world in a restricted, limited way, and to me that's what people are doing when they are using their beliefs to construct an objective world in their minds supposedly existing independently of us, without realizing that what they see as an objective world was constructed in part through their own subjective beliefs.

You don't have to stick to the concept of neurological activity though, which itself stems from experiences you have had. You could say that all we have are experiences, that we can't know for sure what experiences others have, so fundamentally all we talk about is based on our subjective experiential point of view, rather than on the point of view of some omniscient being who could see what everyone experiences and could experience.

In what way does "The cat is on the mat" set out the speaker's feeling or taste? — Banno

But do you realize that subjectivity includes perception itself and not just feeling or taste? A simple example is that there are people who are visually blind, they perceive things very differently. Among people who are not visually blind, we do not agree on everything, some people see a thing as green while others call it blue, some see a thing as orange while others call it yellow. Various people see various shapes when looking at a cloud.

Now, "I believe that the cat is on the mat" sets out an opinion, and hence is subjective. But "The cat is on the mat" and "I believe that the cat is on the mat" express quite distinct things. — Banno

In what way are the two different? To me there's only a difference in the strength of the belief, "I believe that the cat is on the mat" expresses that I may be mistaken, while "The cat is on the mat" expresses that I'm certain I'm not mistaken.

I think that there is some philosophical over-thinking in your approach. I do not think that we would only call a fact objective if people agree about it. I can see no reason why there can't be something that is true, and yet believed false by most folk. I's not hard to think of historical examples. — Banno

But the fundamental problem is how do you determine that something is true? You refer to historical examples, but all they show is that there are things that used to be believed false that are now believed true, that doesn't show in any way that some time in the future they won't possibly be believed false again. Truth appears as shared beliefs of an era.

Today many people laugh when they are told the Sun revolves around the Earth. To them it's obvious that the Earth revolves around the Sun, it's the 'truth'. But how did they arrive at that truth? Often it's simply what they were taught in school, what they read in books, they didn't check the reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the Earth revolves around the Sun, they don't know the assumptions at the basis of the reasoning, but still to them it's obviously true that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Just like for many it used to be obviously true that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Truth appears as something obvious. Much like beliefs. When we believe it it's obviously true. When we believe the contrary it becomes obviously false. As if there was no fundamental difference between truth and belief. Beliefs change, and with it what we consider to be truth. Sometimes people have conflicting beliefs, sometimes a minority has beliefs that they see as truth, against the majority. Then if the minority manages to convince the majority to change their beliefs, these new beliefs are then seen as truth by the majority. Then we say that the minority was right and the majority was wrong, but the only thing that happened is that the majority adopted the beliefs of the minority, they changed their beliefs and with it changed what they see as obvious.

The existence of Jupiter does not depend on you or me or anyone else or anyone at all, nor on what we think or perceive or judge and so on. It is objective. — S

But what makes you think that, what makes you arrive at that objective 'fact' or 'truth'?

People have reported seeing some specific shape through their telescope, that they call Jupiter. Maybe yourself have seen that shape through a telescope, and called it Jupiter. People are able to predict where they have to point their telescope to see that shape. People have sent a spacecraft towards that shape and have seen on their screens a specific shape, that they deem to be the shape they call Jupiter shown in greater details.

You say that the existence of Jupiter does not depend on anyone because anyone is seemingly able to see that shape through a telescope as long as some conditions are met (it is night, Jupiter is not below the horizon, the telescope is powerful enough). What you deem to be the proof of the objective existence of Jupiter is that on many occasions people have reported seeing that shape, and that on many occasions people have been able to predict where they have to point their telescope to see that shape. But what this shows precisely is that your proof of the objective existence of Jupiter hinges on the reports of people, it does depend on what people see, or more precisely on what people report they see.

You don't have a proof that Jupiter exists when no one is looking at it. You don't have a proof that suddenly tomorrow people will not stop seeing that shape. What if when they point their telescope tomorrow the shape has disappeared, for no explainable reason, and no one ever sees it again. How would you react then? All that would be left is reports of people who said they saw that shape and now they don't see it anymore.

And at that point you would say that Jupiter has no objective existence any more, it did, but not any more. Would you realize then that you said Jupiter had an objective existence only because many people reported seeing it, and that Jupiter stops having an objective existence when people stop reporting seeing it? Do you then see that what you call the objective existence of Jupiter does depend on people perceiving it?

Or maybe you would say that Jupiter existed objectively, but then an unknown phenomenon that has an objective existence made Jupiter disappear. But then how would you prove that this unknown phenomenon has an objective existence, if the only evidence you ever find is that people simply stopped seeing Jupiter? There again, the 'objective existence" of this unknown phenomenon would hinge solely on the reports of people, on the reports that they perceived Jupiter and they don't anymore.

You may believe that such a thing cannot happen, that something that you deem to have an objective existence cannot possibly disappear without there being any hint of what made it disappear. But what proof do you have that this cannot happen, other than a belief?

Maybe you would then say that Jupiter was a shared hallucination, that it didn't really exist objectively, but then the consequence is that there was no way to make a difference between an objective existence and a shared hallucination.

The problem with this is that there's a name for it: it's the argumentum ad populum fallacy.

The only thing that's the case due to agreement is the fact that there was an agreement. — Terrapin Station

It's quite deeper than that. The majority may believe that some specific thing is going to happen at some point in time, and to them it would be truth. If they end up agreeing later on that what they predicted would happen didn't happen, they would agree that their belief was false, and they would adopt another common belief as a result, a different truth. The only thing that made their old truth not truth, is that they replaced it with another one. Had they kept the old one, their old belief would still be truth.

How could they have kept their old belief if what they predicted didn't happen? Well, it is always possible to invoke some unknown phenomenon or some additional hypothesis to save a belief that is apparently contradicted by observation. Say we make some experiment to detect dark matter, we predict we're going to detect it, and yet we don't detect it, does that imply we must change our belief that there is dark matter? No, we can say that the dark matter has properties that makes it undetectable to the experiments we performed, and we devise some new experiment, while keeping the belief that there is dark matter, while seeing it as truth that there is dark matter. It is only when we eventually end up agreeing that there is no dark matter, that we will say the belief there is dark matter was false, that we will adopt a different truth.

You can look at this from afar, and judge after the fact that well their old belief wasn't truth because it is now truth that there is no dark matter! But it will only become truth that there is no dark matter when the majority of people (or authorities on the subject) agree and believe that there is no dark matter. So essentially it's not that they were wrong and later on became right, that their old truth was a false belief and their new truth is an objective fact, it's just that the new truth is objective fact because they agree on it, just like their old truth was objective fact because they agreed on it.

I don't see any objective fact or truth completely safe from being challenged and replaced by a different one.

Who feels the same way?

What do you think brought us to this state?

And how can we make a change? — lucafrei

The underlying sad state of affairs is that life is a competition. We kill other species to survive. It feels good to rule the world, but it probably doesn't to other species we destroy.

Within our own species, most of us compete with one another. We want as much power as possible, so the others can be as little a threat as possible. The other is the enemy. So a few accumulate power and don't want to give it away, they fought hard to get where they are, or they got lucky, but they don't want others to get on their level, because they fought precisely to be above them.

And then let's say we made a change, and somehow we all cared for each other, and people wouldn't have to compete to live, wouldn't have to compete to get a job, to have a place to live and to get food. Once we all live comfortably and don't have to struggle anymore then what? Men would still compete to get the woman they want. If they don't compete, who gets to impregnate her and have children? So they don't attempt to elevate others, they attempt to be above them and to bring them down.

Then supposedly if we don't have to struggle to live, then there would be more and more people to the point there would be too many people for too little resources, and again people would be forced to compete or die.

So sadly I think this state is inevitable, and that any change we make would be inevitably temporary. At least I haven't found a solution, and I haven't found anyone with a solution.

It might have practical significance. What if the equation in question controls a piece of machinery, and getting it wrong means the machinery fails? Rocket fails to launch, bridge collapses, patient dies. That kind of thing. I think I would be correct in saying that it then becomes a matter of objective fact. — Wayfarer

It becomes a matter of objective fact if people agree that the rocket fails to launch, or that the bridge collapses, or that the patient dies, it is the agreement that leads us to view it as objective fact, as truth. Without the agreement, there is only your subjective experience against that of others.

If you see something that others can't see, you would say it's right there how can't you see it! And if you insist and others disagree with you they would start calling you delusional, unable to make the difference between objective fact and subjective imagination, but all that's really going on is that others don't agree with what you see.

Now I agree that there are a lot of things most people approximately agree on, but we view them as objective fact, as truth, only because we agree on them.

If it can't be given a truth value, its not a statement would be a simple rule to adopt. — Devans99

Yes I'm not disagreeing, I was just giving my point of view on the 'paradox'.

We can say things such as "This sound is purple" or "This smell is true", but they don't refer to anything in the range of what we experience, or at least I can't form a mental image of whatever these statements may refer to. Same goes with "This statement is false", not all statements that can be uttered in a language are meaningful, and I agree it's not much use to spend much time pondering about them or trying to fit them into some grand framework.

Like the paradoxes in the theory of relativity, they are a consequence of the postulates at the basis of the theory, we can choose to ignore them and just "shut up and calculate" and make predictions that fit somewhat with observations, or we can change the framework (change the theory, pick different postulates) so that the paradoxes disappear while making similar observable predictions, in the end it depends whether we're looking for mathematical 'elegance' with symmetries and so on or if we're looking for intuitive simplicity. I'm a bit like you on this, I prefer intuitive simplicity that can be grasped by many over mathematical elegance that leads to complexity, paradoxes and confusion.

We need to compare a statement with something to determine its truth value. When we say "This statement is false", it can be given a truth value when "this statement" refers to a statement that can be given a truth value. But here, "this statement" refers to "This statement is false", which can be given a truth value if "this statement" refers to a statement that can be given a truth value, and so on and so forth, so we have an infinite regress because we're never specifying what "this statement" refers to.

Not all statements in a given language can be given a truth value, in that they don't refer to anything that allows to determine a truth value. Language is used to refer to things we observe, but in "This statement is false" we're never saying what we're referring to.

No; it is only so because the cat is on the mat.

Truth is not a plebiscite. — Banno

You see what you call a cat on what you call a mat, how does that make it not a subjective statement? Other people might disagree that what they see is a cat or a mat. You would only consider it an objective fact if people agree with you. But if you consider it an objective fact even if people don't agree with you then you consider your subjective experience to be what determines objectivity or truth, if you see something you see it as objective fact or truth even if other people don't see it.

I realize this thread is one month old, but still I agree, scientific education is about accepting, memorizing and applying, then scientific research (the way it's done these days) is mostly about making small tweaks to what was accepted and memorized through education. The scientific community rejects what doesn't fit into its paradigm of the era, and protects its paradigm by refusing to publish or to fund research that challenges big parts of this paradigm. To keep their career, scientists have to get funded and have to be published, so they have to go with the status quo. Those who attempt to go too much against the flow are ridiculed and ostracized. So the big machine keeps going, making small tweaks, more precise measurements, delves into more and more complexity with diminishing returns. Is that because there's nothing important left to discover, or because they're going the wrong way and refuse to explore other potentially fruitful paths?

They might find out if thinking outside the box was encouraged, but scientific education these days is precisely about shaping people to think within the box, so that's what we get, scientists thinking inside the box. We explore all the tiny details inside the box, and never go outside to see what might be there.

At this point the only thing that could change this is someone coming up with a radically different theory that would explain more than the current ones, somehow having been able to step out of the box of mainstream education and with enough private funding to keep researching for years or decades, and with enough intuition and courage and persistence to keep going for so long against the flow.

But even then it's not certain that the scientific community would listen, why would they consider seriously something published by some unknown individual that wasn't published through the proper research journals, that didn't pass the proper process of peer review that safeguards the paradigm of the time, why would they take seriously something that contradicts the concepts and beliefs that are the foundations of their education and of their career, why would they take seriously something that could threaten their very career and means of subsistence if taken seriously? Why would the science journalists report on something that didn't receive the approbation of or would be ridiculed by the authoritative figures on science? Then if the vast majority of people get their scientific news from science journalists or from renowned scientists, who would listen?

Maybe the machine can't be stopped at this point, until the diminishing returns become too low to justify keeping it going. And only then, maybe, there will be room to start anew and explore unexplored paths.

Delusions, errors, assumptions, assertions, etc. All part of some experiencing and learning process maybe. But I would propose (as you might agree) that simply because one can have delusions about the spiritual aspect doesn’t necessarily mean that spirit itself is a delusion. Thoughts? — 0 thru 9

I think the problem is I wouldn't know how to make the difference between reality and imagination, between what exists and what does not. Sure I can believe that something is real and that some other thing is imaginary, I can believe that something exists and some other thing doesn't, but how can I know if I'm not mistaken? How can I know if I'm wrong, how can I know if there isn't something I haven't noticed yet that makes me wrong?

I'm saying this, because it seems what we classify as real or not, what we classify as existing or not, is based a lot on conventions. Usually we say something is real when most people agree they're experiencing it. And the things that are experienced by only one person, or by a small minority, we say they are imagination, that they do not exist, but all we're saying really is they do not exist for the majority. But they do exist for the minority experiencing it, they are real for them.

Then this leads me to think, what we call the material world is the subset of experiences that the majority somewhat agrees on. But what makes experiences that the majority agrees on any more real than those experienced by a minority? It's always real to the subject experiencing it. It's only after the fact that the subject might say, ok this experience wasn't real, it was just my imagination, but in saying that how are we saying anything more than we can't fit well this experience into the range of experiences that we deem to be real?

I just can't clearly make a difference between reality and imagination that is devoid of convention. Experiences that the majority deems to be imagination do have the power to have a 'real' impact on the person experiencing it, on how they behave on how they feel, so we can't say that what's 'real' is what has an observable effect. To materialists any experience we have corresponds to electrons firing in the brain, different patterns of electron motion correspond to different experiences, there is a one-to-one equivalence, but if we start from that premise then how can there ever be a distinction between reality and imagination? From that premise every experience is on the same level of reality, there is nothing to differentiate between a world that is real and a world that is not.

So I feel like I can't hang on to any stable conception of reality. What people call the material world seems to me to be a range of experiences that they somewhat agree on. What people call the spiritual world seems to me to be another range of experiences that they somewhat agree on. Different people have different ideas about what experiences they classify as real and what experiences they classify as imaginary. And it seems that all we can ever do is relate experiences to one another, find relationships within our experiences, commonalities, similarities, and that it is meaningless to talk about what exists or what is real in some absolute sense, it is always subjective, what we experience is real to us, what is part of our experiences exists to us.

If there is something I sometimes see with my eyes closed but never when my eyes are open, do I have to call it imaginary, not part of the 'real' world, or can't I simply say that it is real to me? That sometimes I do see it, that when I do see it it exists, and when I don't see it it exists as a memory, just like there are things I sometimes see with my eyes open but never when my eyes are closed, what makes these things any more real? They're more real just because there are more people who say they see these things than the others? How does this make reality anything more than a social convention?

Saying "it is beyond scientific understanding"...is actually saying, "it is beyond the understanding of scientists."

Therefore...it is beyond the understanding of humans.

Supernatural usually is defined as, "something attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature." If it is "beyond scientific understanding"...then by definition it is beyond human understanding. Surely there ARE things beyond human understanding. — Frank Apisa

What is a scientific understanding? It is an explanation given in terms of what scientists deem to be real, of what they deem to exist. But different cultures have different ideas about what is real and what is not real. What one culture may interpret as contacts with another dimension, another culture would interpret as imagination. If someone experiences something that other people don't, scientists are quick to dismiss it as imagination, as something that originated from the person's mind.

Say you hear a sound that other people don't hear. The sound would be real to you but not to other people. Say you keep hearing it. Does the fact other people don't hear it implies you're not really hearing it? Surely not. If other people don't find a scientific explanation for why you're hearing it, that still doesn't mean you're not hearing it. But to other people it doesn't exist, either you're lying, or you're imagining things. As it turns out scientists have eventually come up with an explanation why sometimes some people hear something that others don't, they call it tinnitus. They could come up with an explanation because they found in the range of what they experienced something that could explain why someone could hear something that others don't.

But now let's say everyone was visually blind except for a few people. If you're a scientist making experiments with your senses (without vision), if you've never experienced sight in your life, you wouldn't know what colors are. Those who do see with their eyes would attempt to describe what they see, but they couldn't do it in a language that you could comprehend, because in your language there would be no word to describe colors, what they would describe would seem very vague to you. You wouldn't find any evidence of what they are talking about in the world you see, and so you would conclude that they are crazy and are imagining things. But if you're being scientifically honest, you can't rule out that they might see things that you can't see, that they have a sense you don't have, or that you have that sense but have never found how to use it.

The distinction between real and imaginary is not clear-cut at all, it only appears to be because we arbitrarily classify experiences as real or imaginary, because we impose a clear distinction rather than there existing an absolute clear boundary that we discover.

Do you think the spiritual could (theoretically of course) interact with the material world? Or perhaps influence or affect it? Or are they somewhat polar opposites? — 0 thru 9

Well I don't know and I don't think we can know for sure, I see it as a matter of belief. Like the belief in an afterlife, some people believe we are irremediably connected to the material world and that the death of the body implies the death of everything else (feelings, the soul, the spirit), while others believe that the soul/spirit can keep going without the material body. How could we know for sure? A given experience can be interpreted in various ways, some will interpret it as evidence of something beyond while others will interpret it as a delusion, how to know for sure?

I think some people were absolutely convinced that the world would end on 21 December 2012, that aliens would come, they saw clearly that it would happen, and yet nothing happened. How can we ever know whether what we see clearly is a premonition or a delusion, until after the fact? And if it does happen we can choose to interpret it as if we could really see beyond the material, or as a coincidence, while if it doesn't happen we can try to save our belief by coming up with some explanation why it didn't happen, or we can interpret it as a delusion.

Likewise, I think a given experience could be interpreted as an interaction between the spiritual and the material, as evidence of a world beyond the material, or as a coincidence, or as a delusion, or as a phenomenon that might eventually be explained within the material world. Then people interpret it in whatever way makes them most comfortable.

Clearly we are not just inert matter, we have feelings we have desires we have sometimes spiritual experiences, if all we are is matter then that matter has the amazing property to give rise to such experiences, and it's quite possible that the matter we see with our eyes, the body, is a tiny part of what we are. It's possible that all our experiences cannot be reduced to electrons moving through the brain. That a lot goes on in the spiritual world and the eyes can see nothing of it. But it's also possible that this spiritual world is a delusion, something we want to believe to feel better, and that once comes the time to leave our material body we will just die with it. Some say that after we die our spirit keeps on living in the people we loved, but some will interpret it as these people having a memory of us and reacting in a way similar to how we reacted through behavioral imitation. How could we know for sure?

It could also be that the spiritual world is something we come up with to cope with the horrors of existence. We encounter horrible things in the material world, which are truly horrible if the material world is all there is, but they seem as much more inconsequential if the material is seen as a lesser aspect of existence, if we believe that what really matters goes on in the spiritual. The spiritual world might be a fantasy world we construct in our minds. After all we are able to construct fantasy worlds with fantastic things and creatures and phenomena that we then tell about in books or in films. But the material world itself is partly constructed too, we imagine that the Sun keeps moving on the other side of the Earth during the night, when we hear some specific sound we imagine there is a car traveling on the street nearby or some bird in a tree even if we don't see it. Then if we get up and look through the window we might see the car or the bird, and so we say that the sound we heard was real and not fantasy, but in what way is that different from imagining a sound and then imagining seeing something consistent with the sound? What makes the material world more real than a world vividly imagined, how could we rule out that the material world is nothing more than a shared imagination?

Existence is mysterious, and anything is possible is what I would say.

To start simply, with something that is (or might be) part of our nature... SPIRIT. Does such a thing exist? Is so, what could it possibly be? Is it by nature mostly undefinable, or only partially “knowable”? Is matter, energy, both, neither? Does the mind, body, actions, and spirit of a person intersect in some way?

And for those feeling adventurous, compare and contrast the idea of “spirit” with that of “soul”. Could a thing or animal be thought to have a spirit, if perhaps not a soul? — 0 thru 9

There is so much to say.

The material world is the world we construct out of our usual five senses, out of colors sounds touch smell and taste. They are usually correlated in some way, which the mind notices, for instance the motion of a shape may correlate with a sound or a touch or a smell or a taste, or several at once.

Feelings, emotions are less evidently correlated with the above, but some correlation can still be found, for instance the view of a sunset or of a person may give rise to specific emotions, which may change over time.

We tend to separate the world of the senses (the material world) from the world of feelings and emotions, maybe because people agree more about what they sense rather than what they feel, which could be what gives rise to the idea that the material world is external while feelings are internal. But we could also see senses and feelings as two aspects of a whole, both of them resulting from interactions between us and the world around us.

Then there are the desires that drive us, which lead us to react in specific ways depending on the world around us, and which are also impacted by the world around us, but they seem to mostly originate from within, which may be what gives rise to the idea of a soul that exists independently from the material world.

And then there are the spiritual experiences that seem to be yet something else, as if they were experiences of a world beyond the material.

I don't see any reason to believe that only humans have a 'soul' or even a spirit, and not other animals. We can't see directly what other animals feel any more than we can see what other humans feel, but for some reason the majority of humans want to believe that only them feel while other animals don't. Maybe because they want to feel special and "better than".

Philosophers attempt to answer some questions, Wittgenstein attempted to answer most of them, he just didn't give the answer they wanted. One doesn't like to hear that their life work is meaningless mind games. It's only anti-philosophy in so far as answering philosophical questions is anti-philosophy, in that it removes mental knots philosophy busies itself with untying.

If language stems from experiences, and questions are settled through experiences, then there are only practical problems.

People ask, "what is the meaning of life?", or more precisely "what is the purpose of my life?". The very concept of purpose stems from experiences where some object is useful to reach something that is wanted, a hammer laying there has no purpose unless one wants to use it for something, then its purpose becomes to help reach the thing that is wanted. In the same way, one's life has no purpose unless one wants to use it for something, then its purpose becomes to help reach what is wanted. The answer is either obvious, or there is no answer until one finds something they want to reach with their life. The underlying practical problem would be "how do I find something I want to reach with my life?", but there is nothing deeper to it.

Or some might ponder endlessly "what is time?", thinking of time as some mysterious entity that passes or that flows, without realizing that our concept of time stems from us experiencing change. A clock is something that changes, that we use as a point of reference to relate to other things that change, and then we say that a clock measures time as if time was an entity with an independent existence, and then we try to find that entity but there is nothing to find, there is just needles moving or shapes changing, there is just change.

Or often we ask "why?", such as "why is there something rather than nothing?", or "why is there this rather than something else?". Where does our concept of "why" stem from? We see someone do something, and we wonder what drove them to do what they did, what was it that they wanted, what was desired to be attained. Or we see something in a unusual place and we wonder how it got there, was it someone who put it there or the wind or some unknown force? The word "why" summarizes that, attempting to know what was the desire that drove someone, or what was the creature or the thing that was responsible for moving or building or destroying something.

But then when we are asking "why is there something rather than nothing", we are wondering what was the desire or what was the thing that is responsible for there being something rather than nothing, which presupposes the existence of some being or phenomenon outside of our experience with the power of creating everything we can experience, but if the "something" in the question is taken to include everything outside of our experience too then "why" cannot apply to it and the question has no meaning. Just like "what does time smell like" has no meaning, many questions that can be formulated in a language have no meaning, in that they don't relate to anything from which the language was built in the first place. And once all such questions are removed there only remains the practical ones that relate to what we do experience.

It is true that you cannot determine objective truth, but your inability to determine it does not mean it can't exist. — curiousnewbie

What do you call objective truth? Something that everyone can agree on?
What do you call subjective truth? Something that someone believes?

How could you know for sure that no one will ever disagree with an objective truth, rendering it not objective truth anymore? Or that someone won't replace one of their beliefs with another, rendering their subjective truth not truth anymore?

It appears that truth has a temporary character rather than an absolute eternal one. Truth remains truth as long as something doesn't come and contradict it. And what I just said remains true as long as you don't find something that would somehow give you the knowledge that something would remain true forever, but then you could doubt the truth of whatever it is that gave you that knowledge.

Truth seems like an ideal that we can never quite reach. It seems there is just temporary beliefs and agreements. "There is no objective truth" would remain true as long as you don't find an objective truth, which itself would remain true as long as it doesn't get contradicted, and so on and so forth.

I think we want absolute truth because we want an absolute standard on which we can rely on no matter what, amidst the unpredictability of existence. But if that unpredictability can never be quite removed, maybe the better course of action is to accept it.

I would say, if you pretend to be someone you're not, people eventually see you and treat you as who you pretend to be, rather than who you are.

As I hinted in other threads, the main problem I see is that psychiatry is focused on making people adapt to the system they live in, and assumes that if they don't adapt well, if they suffer, then there is something wrong in their brain, an illness to cure.

It used to be a mental illness to be a slave and wanting to escape, because a well-adapted slave doesn't want to escape. The problem was found in the individual rather than in the system imposed on the individual, slavery.

It used to be a mental illness to be a homosexual, because a well-adapted human being isn't sexually attracted to individuals of the same sex. The problem was found in the individual rather than in the social norms imposed on the individual.

Now, if you're not well-adapted to spending 2 hours in traffic and sitting 9 hours in a cubicle doing a repetitive task while being pressured by superiors to reach productivity goals, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, and you're stressed or depressed or lash out as a result, it's because you have a mental illness, something wrong in your brain. The problem is found in the individual rather than in the constraints that the individual is made to endure.

These examples show that psychiatry has more to do with ensuring that people conform to the constraints and norms imposed onto them, than with having the well-being of people as its top priority.

Is it then a wonder that despite all the resources spent on psychiatry, more and more people are diagnosed as mentally ill, and more and more people kill themselves every year?

Your point being? — I like sushi

I assume that people generally want to live and having to do something horrific in order to allow people to live seems like a worthy price to pay. — I like sushi

The point is that, in your hypotheticals you can say things such as "such person has X% chance of killing someone" or "if you don't kill a billion people everyone dies" with certainty, but how that translates to real life is the problem, and attempting to connect your hypotheticals with real life can indeed be dangerous.

gave a fine example. Adolf was convinced that jews were going to lead to the extinction of mankind, if you read Mein Kampf he says as much. Here is the passage:

Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his Crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago.
And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.

The real fundamental problem is not in deciding between killing 1 billion people or letting the human race die, but in knowing with certainty that mankind is about to disappear and the only way to save it is to kill a billion people.

You may be absolutely convinced that the human race is going to go extinct and that you need to kill a billion people to prevent it, but what if you're wrong? What if there was a flaw in your reasoning, what if there was something you hadn't realized that implies you killed a billion people for nothing? Then you would be no savior, you would be the worst monster. Out of attempting to be the morally good individual saving the human race, you would instead become the worst monster who killed a billion people because of his delusions.

People commit the worse atrocities out of fear, yet what is feared is often worse than what actually happens. As Mark Twain said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so".

They BOTH have a 50% chance of killing one person NOT a 50% chance between them. So the later. — I like sushi

Ok, it could have been interpreted as if "both taken together" have a 50% chance of killing someone.

So if you kill track A on average 2.75 people die, and if you kill track B on average 2 people die. If you kill track A at least 2 people die for sure and maximum 3, if you kill track B at least 1 person dies for sure and maximum 3. So if your variable to minimize was the projected loss of life then you would pick track B.

But in real life you don't know how the lives of people are going to turn out. If you have two 90 years old on track A and one baby on track B what do you do? Then you might want to look for the guy who tied these people to the tracks so he doesn't do it again.

Well the hypothetical doesn't mention how many children they're gonna have, what kind of life their children will have, it doesn't say what a bad life is, or whether it's even possible for everyone to agree on what a bad life may be, it doesn't say whether someone living a bad life might inadvertently save many people through no will of their own (for instance because of his 'bad' actions the guy causes a plane to land to get him arrested but if he hadn't committed these 'bad' actions the plane would have crashed because of some technical failure and killed everyone on board), ...

The fundamental problem is how do you value life? Different people value life differently. Some will see the life of a child as worth more than that of an elderly, or that of a beautiful woman as worth more than that of an ugly one, and some will disagree on what makes a woman beautiful or ugly, ..., in your hypothetical many would make a decision based on what the guys look like.

Then when you say they "both have a 50%" of killing someone, do you mean there's 50% chance one person dies because of the two of them and 50% chance no one dies, or that there is 25% 0 die, 50% 1 dies and 25% 2 die?

Do the people on the track come with a sticker on their head that says how likely they are to kill someone in their life?

What if the guys on track A are sterile and the guy on track B ends up having 10 children but there is 50% chance one of them is Hitler, who do we pick?

Your writing is incomprehensible. Perhaps you meant "our thinking is involved, as situations and our responses, positive or negative, must be evaluated before our minds tell our bodies what to do." — Louco

To be fair to him, you only changed one letter and added a comma.

It is bad for them too. I don't take much stock in self-reports at a particular time/place. Benatar did a good job indicating our psychological mechanisms for reporting "good" about "not good" things, specifically through Pollyannaism (optimism bias), adaptation (ideal/initial goals are changed to lesser goals because life doesn't meet them), comparison (if people are seen as having it worse, you must be better off).

Also, my own input is that when interviewing someone about "LIFE" there is social pressure and cues to make positive statements, not to sound too whiny or make dramatic pronouncements, or generally look like a Debbie-downer, so of course people will usually report they are better off. — schopenhauer1

I can tell you there was zero embellishment in my experiences I reported, I described them as I felt then. Also there are quite pessimistic people out there, always focusing on what they don't have rather than on what they have, comparing themselves to some famous star they see on TV rather than some poor African dudes dying of hunger in a war zone, always seeing the glass half empty rather than half full. I have had genuine lasting moments of happiness in my life, so I can't pretend they have never existed. And I have been in much better situations than where I am now, where I do tend to feel like shit quite regularly.

What I'm wondering is that if you were so convinced life is fundamentally shit and that it cannot possibly get any better, why do you continue living? What keeps you alive?

I see it as one battle in a war. I believe infinity is impossible in general. There are proofs but people don't buy the proofs. So I've settled for trying to show each instance of infinity leads to a contradiction. Infinite space is one of these instances. — Devans99

What is there to gain by winning the war though?

Wittgenstein had a nice solution to stop bothering about these kinds of problems, basically do we ever observe infinite things? No we only observe finite things, and our concept of expansion stems from our observations of finite things that expand, so it is meaningless to apply a concept that applies to finite things to something that is not finite.

But even if you got cosmologists to stop talking about an infinite space that expands, that wouldn't change much in the grand scheme of things.

If it goes on forever, there is no room for any expansion; there is nowhere to expand to. — Devans99

I'm of the 2nd believe. That head spinning feeling when we think of infinity is our minds choking on a very illogical concept I think. — Devans99

Yes we can't imagine it, we can just imagine the process. Honestly I think those who try to apply the concept of infinity to the universe just do it on aesthetic grounds, they see beauty in the idea of something that goes on forever rather than something with borders. But they couldn't make any objective observation that would prove the universe goes on forever.

But the metric is expanding. So we can equate the metric to space without having to resort to a believe in spacetime. And if the metric is expanding, the metric, IE space, cannot be infinite. — Devans99

Well you can imagine a finite part of the universe and visualize the metric expanding in that part, and imagine that the same goes on in every part of an universe that goes on forever.

Like you can imagine a finite part of the natural numbers (say {1; 2}) and visualize adding real numbers in that part (so it becomes say {1; 1.01; 1.001; 1.0001; 1.00001; ...; 2}), and imagine that the same goes on in all other parts of the natural numbers ({2; 3}, {3; 4}, {4; 5}, ...) that go on forever.

You just can't imagine an infinite universe as a whole doing that, like you can't imagine all the natural numbers at once doing that, you can just imagine the process. Then some might say "our mind is not able to grasp it all at once but that's only a limit of our mind", while others might say "something that cannot be conceived as a whole doesn't exist or is impossible".

Cosmologists/astronomers observe that the light coming from distant galaxies is redshifted. They assume that this redshift is due to these galaxies receding from us. They observe that on average the more distant the galaxy the higher the redshift, so they conclude that the more distant the galaxy the faster it recedes from us. They assume that we do not have a special place in the universe, and so that other galaxies would make a similar observation. They conclude that all galaxies are moving away from each other, at a rate proportional to the distance between them. At that point there is no mention of any "space" expanding, it's just galaxies moving away from each other.

One way to view it is to say that galaxies are staying still while there is some underlying space expanding, but no entity called "space" has ever been observed expanding or stretching, when we say space expands we're saying nothing more than galaxies move away from each other at a rate proportional to the distance between them, which doesn't require an expanding space to describe.

The universe could have been arbitrarily large at the time of the big bang, and could be arbitrarily large today.

Saying the universe is infinite is just fantasy talk, in the sense that's not something that could be deduced from observation. Also the concept of infinity is not something that can be directly grasped, we can conceive of something going on forever, but we can't conceive of the entirety of that thing, so we can't conceive of that entire thing growing bigger. But mathematicians have no problem imagining something that goes on forever inside something that goes on forever, like there being an infinity of real numbers between two natural numbers and there being an infinity of natural numbers, but it's just mind games really. At the end of the day, saying the universe is infinite is the same as saying in some imaginary world pigs can fly, sure we can imagine it but how is it relevant to anything in our lives besides it being some mind game?

What happens if life really is bad. We tend to psychologize the badness and make it YOUR problem or MY problem. If it is your or my then it is not A problem in general. What happens if life is actually bad, but by psychologizing it, you are being complicit in perpetuating the badness by trying to correct the ones chiming up about it. Like a bad boss who doesn't want to hear complaints- shape up or ship out is the message. However, there is no improvement plan- it is just better coping techniques. Life itself can't be the problem though, right? — schopenhauer1

I agree to some extent with that, I have said numerous times in other threads how psychiatry focuses on making the individual adapt to the system we impose on him rather than changing the system so it becomes better adapted to the individual, pathologizing the individual rather than the system the individual finds himself in. But at the same time there are constraints about existence that are seemingly out of our control, such as the need to eat and the need to share this planet, so to some extent the individual needs to adapt to that if he wants to find his life worth living.

And these unavoidable constraints of existence cannot be what makes life really bad, because many people find their life worth living. So then the solution to get better for those who struggle through life lies in changing what can be changed, either changing the way society functions and the way we interact with each other, or the individual. I don't agree with psychiatry that the solution is to be found in drugs that we make the individuals ingest so that they can adapt to whatever system we impose on them, rather I believe that most if not all mental suffering can be traced back to fears, fears deeply ingrained that haven't been uncovered or that haven't been faced. If you could overcome your fears and find your life worth living as a result, would you see that as a coping technique, or would you see it as yourself having let go of your burdens and able to enjoy life?

Myself I have a deep fear of people, of being judged negatively, of being rejected, of being pointed at, of being mocked. I have come up with coping techniques, playing a role, being oblivious to others, thinking I'm better than others, but they don't solve anything, they only mask the fear and cause other problems, and worse than that they lead to stop seeing the fear as the underlying problem.

In society I feel regularly stressed, to the point of having sometimes dark thoughts and seeing existence as meaningless. Yet when I go deep in nature, far from anyone, I feel right at home in a profound sense, I thrive, I'm happy to be alive, and in these moments it makes it all worth it. The fear of people is still there, but there it is inconsequential because there are no people around. There I find life beautiful. Within society, on a few occasions I ingested a specific substance that had as a temporary effect to remove my fear of people, not because it made me reckless, not because it made me not care about anything, but somehow it made me see the beauty in people rather than seeing them as threats, and in these moments I could see how beautiful life can be without our fears. But this is impossible to see when your fears take hold of you, because they put a filter onto the world that prevents you from seeing the beauty.

But the real solution lies not in staying constantly deep in nature, or in ingesting that substance constantly, it lies in overcoming the fear for good. I am still afraid to face my fears, it isn't easy for me to talk about my fear of people, it wasn't easy for me to come and read what you might have answered to my previous post, what if he rejected me, what if he said that what I say is bullshit. I believe that one day I will succeed, to the point where the fear will be gone for good, where I will see the world for good without this filter that destroys life. I don't want to perpetuate the badness, I want to help you feel better, to help you enjoy life. Maybe because you remind me a bit of myself.

Meanwhile, you were never born for yourself, nor can you be. You were always being used. But hey, the outcome of birth is that now YOU have to deal with the impinging factors of life. — schopenhauer1

What the main point is in a nutshell is that some people think that trying to master all the minutia of some topic inherently provides some sort of worth. Thus the more complexity you understand of a subject, the more your life is justified. By knowing the complexity of a subject matter, this somehow provides you more worth. — schopenhauer1

I agree that there is no absolute objective justification or worth to anything, I agree that you didn't choose to be born, but I don't agree that you have to feel used, and I don't agree that you have to feel unworthy, this is just how you feel, because of your past circumstances.

Whatever you do, someone somewhere will find it useless. It doesn't stop people from doing what they do, because they find worth in it themselves, and they are not looking for an absolute justification that doesn't exist, the only justification they need is that they want to do it.

Sometimes people think only about themselves, or need your help, and make you suffer as a result. You can choose to interpret it as if they are using you, but you can also simply interpret it as if they think about themselves or need help.

I think that if you felt worthy, you would not have such a pessimistic outlook on life. You would not try so hard to find in things an inherent meaning that doesn't exist unless you give them a meaning yourself.

Existence is about the stress- the stress of living with others, the stress of getting by, the stress of finding comfort, the stress of finding peace, the stress of mastering minutia, the stress of labor, hell, it goes down to the very stress of our own desires as @leo stressed. It doesn't go away- robot paradise or not. Flow and creativity don't justify or compensate for the negative characteristics. If someone said birth entails all this, but you get to have flow states and creativity, I'd tell them to shove it where the sun don't shine- they can keep it. I see the hope for achieving flow states and creativity as just ANOTHER propaganda tactic thrown out there by psychologists and social scientists to make sure people are getting along well enough in society. That is complicity, not a justification for life's continuance. — schopenhauer1

The stress is how you feel about existence, many people feel like you, but many other people feel differently about it, it is a subjective interpretation rather than an objective thing. I think that what you should be looking at is why is it everything is so stressful to you, what is it that prevents you from finding joy in life. The stress stems from a fear. I know it's not an easy question, but what is it that you fear deep down?

This may seem unrelated to the thread, but I see it as the fundamental reason why you made this thread in the first place. On the surface you try to show people that there is no inherent meaning in anything they do, that there is no inherent justification to keep living, but they do see a meaning and a justification because of how they feel, how they feel is the only meaning and justification they need. And I think that if there was much less stress and much more joy in your life you too would see the meaning and the justification, which is why I think that what you're really looking for is joy in life, find out what prevents you from experiencing it, and then your quest for meaning and justification will be over. It is not the meaninglessness and the lack of justification that takes out the joy, it is the lack of joy that gives rise to the feeling of meaninglessness and the absence of justification.

There is more than one way to look at desire besides thinking of it as separated from cognition and experience. It is only when we begin from a desire-thinking split that we are faced with a self-invented problem of having to explain how we are pushed(drive, motive) or pulled(environmental re-enforcement) into action. We inherited this quandry from the notion of static equilibrium used in the physical sciences, But a living system is not a static thing, it is a self-enclosed system of exchanges and interaction with an environment. It exists by changing itself, and thus is a dynamically equilibrating system. — Joshs

I simplified, but yes our desires are shaped by our experiences and beliefs, which themselves are shaped by our desires, in an interacting whole. It might be more accurate to see desire, experience and belief as three aspects of the same changing thing, which would give a more poetic aspect to existence than seeing us as machines controlled by our desires.

Ok, I'll go with this schema. It is the burden of these desires (that lead to more minutia) that I am concerned with. Once born, you are responsible for your desiring. To live in a society to "get stuff done" we need those desires to be driven to ever more knowledge, application, capacity, and aptitude for understanding and performing minutia. The opposite of this is sleep, nirvana, being immersed in some form of oneness feeling. It is the general, not the specific. It is rest not intense mongering and tending to the minutia. Once born, we are responsible to see the minutia carried out. The bird must follow its prime directive. The human must KNOWINGLY monger its minutia, live its daily life, constantly evaluating the situation, making conscious, deliberate decisions, that are more minutia mongering. There is no end to it once born. — schopenhauer1

I think I agree with you fundamentally, but where are you going with it?

The feeling I get is that you reject the idea that a life where we constantly "get stuff done" is more meaningful than a life spent doing nothing, you are against the idea that other people or society should pressure you to "get stuff done", which I agree with.

But also it seems that you are lamenting the fact that existence is the way it is, seeing desires as a "burden" rather than an opportunity, which leads me to think that you don't find life worth living, and that philosophy was a way for you to attempt to make it worth living (correct me if I'm wrong).

Many people don't do philosophy and yet would say that their life is worth living, that they're better off alive than dead. Some would say that it's because "they don't know better", but I think it's more simply that they have experiences that make their life worth living. And the feeling I get is that what you are fundamentally looking for and lacking is these experiences that make life worth living.

I have found that it is often our fears that take away the joy from life. So what are you afraid of deep down?

While on a surface level it appears that all we ever do is get stuff done, you are stating that from the point of view of looking at the world with your eyes alone. When we see with our eyes alone the world appears soulless, we appear as a bunch of machines getting stuff done endlessly. But that's not the whole world, because there are also feelings there that the eyes can't see. There is something going on in our minds that cannot be reduced to what the eyes see, that cannot be reduced to getting stuff done.

All this is intensive minutia mongering. Life itself is about immersing oneself in the details in order to obtain some goal of survival, entertainment, or comfort. At the social level, these goals are intertwined with incentives and rituals to induce production and replication of resources, people, and the culture itself.

There is only repetitive, minutia mongering until death do us part. — schopenhauer1

Yes. This is the way I see it:

We feel desires. These desires lead us to set goals and attempt to reach them. Without any desire we wouldn't do anything and would quickly die.

Our fundamental desires have no justification, there is no justification to our desire to live other than if we didn't have it we would die quickly.

People do things, because they experience a desire that leads them to do these things. The experience of the desire is what gives meaning to the act, without the desire the act has no meaning. Using a tool has no meaning if there is no desire we want to fulfill by using the tool.

So without experiencing the desire, anything anyone does can be seen as meaningless, including indeed all the minutia people immerse themselves in.

The people immersed in these activities see them as a tool to fulfill one of their desires. For instance, people "programming using C# to create new software functionality" may do it because that's what their boss tells them to do and they know that if they do what their boss tells them they will get money which will allow them to buy food to eat, to pay for a place in which they will sleep comfortably, to do fun activities, which is what they desire.

Some other people may do this very same activity of "programming using C# to create new software functionality" because they believe that the software once finished will help them or others in some way, which would be the desire that is fueling them.

Some other may do this very same activity to prove to themselves or to others that they are able to do some complicated task better than others, with the end goal to feel good about themselves and confident, which would be the desire driving them.

There are a whole bunch of different desires that could lead people to do a given activity, but the reason they do that activity is because they see it as a way to fulfill a desire they have, a desire that they experience. Their desire coupled with the belief that the activity is a way towards that desire is what gives them meaning to what they do.

This all led me to wonder where desires come from, if our whole existence depends on what we desire then where do our desires come from in the first place? Then I realized that we could see all our desires as evolutionary tools that were selected through competition for survival, that everything is as if we have the desires we do because they helped our ancestors/species survive in some way. As if we were machines controlled by our desires, attempting as best as we can to fulfill them, and surviving and reproducing and perpetuating the species in the process, in this grand cosmic game.

What could ever be absolute truth?

How could we ever know whether the 'laws' of physics we discover will remain accurate tomorrow or in 1 billion years?

How could we ever know whether the beliefs that we hold now won't change in the future?

How could we ever know whether something that we deem to be absolutely true won't be contradicted by something we hadn't imagined or thought about?

There are things we believe, there are appearances, there are things that seem to be the case sure, but absolute truth? It seems more an ideal we try to reach than something we could ever have.

I guess the big question is, WHY is it meaningful to create technologies? I've already discounted the idea you mentioned earlier, that it is our species' purpose. Any other ideas? Understanding the regularities of nature, usings specific and complicated maths to determine exact outcomes. What is it about this that makes this a bastion of meaning? — schopenhauer1

The way I see it people are driven by their desires. Maybe all our desires were selected through evolution. Some people have the desire to understand, to predict, to build cool stuff, to be famous, to feel better than, to help others. They use specific and complicated maths to fulfill one or several of these desires. Working on fulfilling their desires is what gives them meaning. There is inherently nothing there that makes this activity a bastion of meaning over any other.

But there are some people who see this activity as giving access to the ideal of Truth, to the absolute, to everlasting certainty in a world full of uncertainties, something unchanging that we can rely on no matter what. The desire of reaching this ideal may be again a byproduct of evolution. Some see this ideal embodied in an absolute God who governs an underlying absolute reality, and believe they can reach this absolute by worshipping it. Others believe there are absolute laws that govern an underlying absolute reality (which they may call laws of the Universe, of Nature, of Physics), and that uncovering them will give them access to the absolute.

The strength of the desire to reach this absolute may be the reason why some people see worshipping a God or attempting to uncover laws of the Universe as activities more meaningful than any other.

But then of course even if such Laws existed, what would happen once we uncover them and reach the promised land, the nirvana that we believe awaits us once we uncover them? We would have a great ability to predict the future, to ensure our survival, but what would become the meaningful activities once our survival is ascertained? I believe our state of mind then wouldn't be far from that of the people who dedicate their life to becoming rich, believing that riches will give them bliss, and who once rich find themselves purposeless and realize it didn't make them any happier.

I mean the meaning/purpose of a fish is to swim and swim well. A tiger must predate well and so on. What of humans? That which sets us apart from the rest of the living world is our mind, its higher faculties of logic and creativity. I believe, ergo, that cultivation and employment of these higher faculties define us. — TheMadFool

It's a bit dishonest to the fish and tiger to describe them solely from what we see them do, while describing humans with having a mind because we are able to experience our own mind. Who knows what it's like to be a tiger or a fish, what their mind is like? Some people have a rich inner world, yet you wouldn't guess it from barely looking at them, based on the human-centric measures of what they build and how productive they are. Who's to say other animals don't also have a vivid imagination that is simply not apparent to us?

If some alien species were to observe our behavior, without taking into account our hypothetical mind, like we don't take into account the hypothetical mind of other animals, they could easily say the meaning/purpose of humans is to build more and more and spread like an invasive species at the expense of their environment.