-Well in my opinion, the issue lies with the God claim . — Nickolasgaspar

Yes, you are in very good company focussing on the facticity or fictionality of "the God claim". That is exactly what I am pointing to myself. As long as your issue is that, you will never understand something like this:

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour's love for me,
Love to the loveless shown that they might Lovely be. — Samuel Crossman

This is why a philosopher cannot find god; he cannot make a commitment to anything, but must always be weighing and evaluating and reasoning. It's a very good recipe for thinking, but a very poor one for living. — unenlightened

The adequacy of human evaluation and human reasoning needs to come to be questioned before there can be any room for any other issue. This if you like is my counter question to philosophy - what evidence do you have that your merely evolved thinking and reasoning apparatus is in any way capable of understanding the universe that birthed it? What is reasonable about that faith in the face of all the evidence? Surely, of all the religions, faith in oneself is the least adequate?

It's an analogy, that you are taking literally in order to try and undermine.

So I'll try a different one. I am a fan of justice. This does not mean I think justice exists, it means I am committed to the cause; I strive for justice, i cheer for it. And you can explain that life is complicated and knowledge is never absolutely certain so on, so I am wrong to think there can be perfect justice, but you will be missing the point, as you have missed my previous point.

In order to choose the reasonable Default position we only need to evaluate the claims... — Nickolasgaspar

This is why a philosopher cannot find god; he cannot make a commitment to anything, but must always be weighing and evaluating and reasoning. It's a very good recipe for thinking, but a very poor one for living.

As Searle says in his conclusion, the core of the bad argument is to "...think that somehow or other, the experiences are themselves the object of the experiences". There is a sort of folding of the mind in on itself, so that the picture is of a homunculus attempting and failing to prove that there is a world "outside". — Banno

Indeed, one of the things one almost never sees, is the inverted image on the back of the eye. Not even if one peers into the mirror. It's just too dark in there, and there's nowhere to sit.

Understanding substance takes substantial understanding.

Substance is what is the basis of objects, and understanding is what is the basis of subjects. These are etymological definitions. Perhaps objects have no basis, perhaps subjects have none either. Perhaps this topic is entirely misconceived.

the law of conservation of energy proves that energy can’t be created. — Someone

Some radical circularity here. The "law" is discovered by the repeated failure to produce perpetual motion machines, etc. The law doesn't prove anything about the world but contrarywise, the world proves the law. And there is a built in contradiction; if energy cannot be created how come there is energy? Laws have a scope; and energy is conserved in the universe; how energy got to be in the universe is necessarily beyond the scope of the conservation law.

But apart from that, never argue with dogmatic scientism or dogmatic religion.

The self is the idea of the self that the self has; the circular track that thought runs around.



In therapy it turns out that ChatGPT is unable to form new memories, and thus unable to sustain a narrative self. There is a degenerative brain disease associated with binge drinking that has a similar effect on humans, extreme Korsakoff syndrome. One can talk to them well enough, but they are in effect frozen in time, and will respond to you five minutes later as if they have never met you before. Thirty years on, they are confused and distressed to see how old they look in the mirror, because time simply does not pass for them, and they think of themselves always as whatever age the were at the onset. You can explain to them, but they cannot remember it.

The narrative has ended, and yet persists, because it has never been transcended.

Can we just rename it "Election 2024" — Baden

Or "US Election 2024" in case another democracy comes into being in the solar system somewhere.

Are you saying it's better to be thin-skinned than thick-skinned? It passes through — Changeling

I'm saying that there is a tendency to resist pain, or to deny it, or to react to it with fear or anger; these prolong pain by turning it into suffering.

Say you call me an idiot; I tend to deny it, and then be afraid that everyone will think I'm an idiot and then blame you for being so rude, and call you an idiot back. All this is a resistance, I don't let the idea in, and so it remains there pricking at me.

But if I simply accept that I am an idiot, there is no problem - it is only the image I had of myself being smart that has taken a knock.

The same principle actually applies to physical pain, but it is more difficult to remain present with back pain or a sore thumb.

Let me outline a simple reason why a philosopher might not find God.
It is at the simplest a confusion of faith with belief.

If you ask a fan of Ipswich town FC. which is the greatest football club, they will tell you it is Ipswich Town FC. If you ask them about the next game, they will tell you that Ipswich will win. And if you point out that Ipswich almost invariably loses and often come bottom of the league, they will be hurt, but not dismayed. To be a fan is to be a loyal supporter and keep the faith in good times and bad times. To be an Ipswich fan is not wrong as a matter of fact, nor is it even a matter of fact that Ipswich will lose their next game.

It is not that the facts do not matter; the win is all important, and the loss is a heavy blow, but faith covers them both and amplifies them both. Faith is what makes these things matter at all. I am not a football fan, and I couldn't care less about Ipswich Town FC. I can therefore afford to be philosophical about their chances. But the only people who care about my analysis, are the Ipswich fans.

So if you are not a fan of god, you will always miss out on the excitement, and think yourself very wise.

[They] modified the algorithm that they use to determine whether something is of interest or not, and so things that have been there all along are now popping up for the first time. — Mick West

That's what my imaginary friend said!

What if we haven't been GIVEN anything? — universeness

Then we have made it all ourselves.

Or else it has all just fallen to us.

There is no evidence — universeness

Do you require evidence to be resentful? Do you require evidence to be grateful? Should I ask for your evidence that there is no evidence? You seem to be selling some snake oil here, and even giving commandments.

Convince me it is worth convincing you. — T Clark

It isn't.

Yeah, I struggled with the right way to say it. Conscious but impersonal? Not even that really. It's that reality can't be separated from human involvement, so the universe is half-human. — T Clark

Ah, the self made man who worships his maker?

You see, either you bite the bullet of a 'transcendent' person who give s a fuck, or you have a half assed personification of the generality of 'life' which obviously doesn't give a fuck. And why should we give a fuck for that which doesn't give one?

God created the world, and then left it in the garage, and went off to do something more important. "Praise the Lord!"

Or, God didn't exactly create the world, it's just his digestive system. "Praise the Lord!"

Convince me that it is worth even speculating about this.

The recognition that it is worthwhile to see the universe, reality, as something living is an important one. It changes how you see everything. It gives something to be grateful to for all we have been given — T Clark

Something living but impersonal?

Impersonal gods are not worth talking to or (therefore) talking about. Stick to physics, no impersonal god will care.

My imaginary friend told me that there is always a load of balloony junk floating about and generally nobody cares, and they turn down the radar sensitivity. Then thiis big high-level thing appears like an extra moon, and is obviously way too low and visible, and everyone puts their tin-foil hats on, and turns the sensitivity up to max, and discover some more junk.

Therefore, China is bad, for filling the media with talk about their broken junk.

But I suspect my imaginary friend is making it up, because the Chinese are cunning and sinister.

Only I can prove solipsism true. By definition.

...often reality is more accurate than fiction. — L'éléphant

You heard it here first!

Did you invent science, religion, language, civil society, law, agriculture, technology, architecture, cloth-making, education, etc, etc, etc... or did you inherit them?
And if you did inherit all these benefits and advantages, do you then refuse to accept the responsibility to repair the damages they have done as well as enjoy the benefits?

As to how that responsibility should be exercised, we can have a long and possibly fruitful discussion, but if you take no responsibility, there is nothing I have to say to you.

A posteriori, he does, but not as a necessary fact. — Wayfarer

It is a curious consequence of JTB knowledge that one may be certain, but one never knows that one knows - one always knows absolutely of the hypothetical Al's and Betty's whether they know or not, because the truth is stipulated in the hypothesis, but one's own knowledge or another's in real life... Philosophers put themselves in the position of the conjuror revealing where the queen really is after taking the sap's money. It's probably over-compensating for their own gullibility. :wink:

As Hume described, there is no reason to expect, never mind know, that the future will be like the past, except the desperation that one has nothing whatsoever else to go on.

I'm puzzled by your preference for the Incredible String Band, when there were others who could sing...

Fairport - Sandy Deny! — Banno

Sandy Deny, indeed! Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Albion Band! But this is a philosophy forum, therefore String Band or Bob Dylan. A words thing.

Your point that Al has no justification for believing that his car has been stolen is a good one. Until she discovers that her car has been stolen, the same is true of Betty, of course. That’s a key problem, of course. Justification can be less than conclusive. — Ludwig V

Of course it can. we are fallible. I always keep my keys in my right pocket so I always know where they are, unless I forgot to empty the pockets when I changed my trousers. In that case, I discover that I did not know where my keys were after all. Or unless there was a hole in my pocket, or someone has stolen them, or they have been dissolved by the alien key dissolving ray, or God has done a miracle, or I hallucinated having keys, or...

But meanwhile, I know where my keys are. Knowledge is provisional and fallible - if the car isn't there when Betty gets back she cannot have known it was there, but she thought she did until she learned better. This is only problematic for the pope, who is supposed to be infallible. You're not the pope, are you?

so why the torment of cancer? — Gnomon

That's a bit of a weasel question - I don't mind a bit of discomfort, but...

Life is the dialectic. Bliss plus torment produces awareness. Again and again; more and more. Take the heroin and ease the pain at the cost of your life. Yeah, leprosy does not directly cause disfigurement, but numbness, that leads to damage to the extremities, infection, and loss. But this is more. The heaven that is the womb cannot be experienced, because there is no comparison, only the loss of paradise can be felt.

This is rather a hijack of the thread though. Perhaps we should get back to discussing the language ...

1. Yes.
2. No.
3. No.
4. No.
5. K = JTB.
1. Al's memory Justifies his Belief as to the location of his car, and his belief is True.
2. Al has no Justification for Believing his car to have been stolen, only for considering it possible.
3. Betty has a Justified Belief, that turns out to be Not True.


The situation would change if the crime rate was so high that it was reasonable to expect that one's car would be stolen, in which case one would presumably take extra precautions, or expect trouble.

so the idea of the UK taking the control of EU was a silly, idiotic idea. — ssu

I agree with your analysis of the political thinking. But my explanation is of the failure of that calculation. Idiotic ideas are the rule for popular thinking; the mantra, "take back control", is still being recited. that is the same idiotic idea. Independence good - isolation bad: trade deal good - harmonisation bad: and so on. Membership makes good economic sense, but has been trumped by xenophobia. Idiotic for sure, but actively fostered and exploited by the Conservatives for decades.

I had a dream.

Actually I had 2 recurring dreams as a child. At the age of around eight learning something of the facts of life, I realised that they were memories of birth trauma. They were wordless of course, but became describable to myself as I learned to speak. The first: I am in a field and a huge thing is coming down, crushing me. That is a contraction. The second was associated with the house I was living in as a child. I had to go from the warm sunny kitchen along a dark passage to light a fire in the cold gloomy living-room, but there was an unnameable monster in the passage. That was the memory of the birth-canal and actual birth.

I think this is fairly rare, and one reason I think I had these memories available even as dreams is that I was my mother's 5th child and had a very easy birth. I think for most, birth trauma is too extreme and the memories have to be shut off completely.

Anyway, in relation to @Gnomon's dialectic there is no memory of the life in the womb as such; there is no event, nothing much happens; "there's absolutely no strife, living the timeless life". Birth is the antithesis of life in the womb, the first event, and awareness is the first synthesis. Thus is the problem of evil easily answered: without the pain and terror, there would be no awareness, no subjectivity.

Earth, water, fire, and air
Met together in a garden fair
Put in a basket bound with skin
If you answer this riddle
If you answer this riddle, you'll never begin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s3KHT5JYdU

How is joining (and then exiting) the European Union the last gasp of Colonial sentimentality I don't understand. — ssu

Joining was an attempt to create a new European Empire, and when the French and Germans refused to be subserviently grateful for our presence, they became an oppressive bureaucracy responsible for holding us back. It's the same thinking that considers our independence from Europe is a great boon and natural right, but Scotland's independence from England is insulting and unthinkable. It's all sentimentality, and that's why it has the consistency of porridge - thick, but easily stirred.

Our intuition is doing something more than just a straight forward self-interest. — Banno

Game theory assumes a-sociality. But you don't get me I'm part of the union. I wrote an essay on that back in the day. The prisoner's dilemma is set up to isolate, and this game is stipulated as one-shot, for the same reason: to preserve the individual free of the taint of social influence. It was always the theory of a sociopath.

we intuitively reject the correct games-theoretical response, which is to accept any offer. — Banno

Because tomorrow the offer will be even worse. I'm saying the theory is wrong if it claims it is only played once. One's wages are paid weekly.

The game is played exactly one time. — Banno

No it isn't. It is being played over and over, all the time, everywhere. If it were not so it would be of no interest to anyone. You and I may only play once, but I will get better treatment from others if it becomes known that I speak softly, but carry a big stick. this is called 'investment'. As every criminal kno.

Perhaps we could take a more nuanced approach and talk about remote and proximate causes of Brexit. Let's meet at the halfway point, eh? — Agent Smith

I suggest a single "Elizabethan age", subtitled "the age of Empire" to stretch from Liz 1. to Liz 2. Brexit is the thus the last gasp of Colonial sentimentality and the final end of British dominance in the world, orchestrated by the same buccaneering (rapaciously exploiting) spirit that built the Empire in the first place, turned full force on the populace and accumulated wealth of the mother country.

the inexorable decrees of fate in Greek drama. — Wayfarer

The thought police insist we speak of 'determinism', and pour scorn on 'fate'.

He at the same time seems to want Will to be a double-aspect to reality, yet seems to also think it is prior in some sense. The Will, — schopenhauer1

"Water seeks its own level", we used to hear. More generally, the will of matter is to clump together - I think that's called gravity, There being no lawgiver, the universe must follow its own will. It dances wildly to its own song, and the will of physicists is to learn the tune.

(The will of toothbrushes is to fall into the toilet at the first opportunity, as every skoolboy kno.)

I'll put this here by way of waving a little flag at one of the experts, and linking to a related thread:

To me, the absolutely crucial thing about Kant is his recognition that 'things conform to thoughts' rather than vice versa. I still think very few people really get the significance of that. If you understand it, it completely undercuts 'scientism'. — Wayfarer

The experts will correct me if I am wrong, but this is a recapitulation of 'the beginning' of philosophy. It aligns with what we know of the prehistory of ideas, though it may seem odd to the modern ear. Perhaps you will understand easily enough that I see your post on a screen and naturally infer a person behind it expressing thoughts in the same way that I am expressing thoughts. And it is just as natural to me to see the cat creeping up on the bird and the bird looking around, and infer an internal life for each with intentions and understandings. And why not also for trees and rocks and thunderstorms and volcanos?

The alternative is to think one is oh so special, to have an internal being. The modern depopulation of the world of all the myriad sprites and gods and other spirits and agencies, right up to the Great Sky God himself, is actually the bizarre and unnatural position that stands in need of explanation and justification.

Well I gave a number of examples. John want to save one person - Mark. This is an end, do you agree?

To do so he kills 100, this is the means to his end, do you agree? Each time he kills someone, he says "for Mark!" — PhilosophyRunner

I foresee hundreds of mass murderers rushing about with cries of "for Matthew", "for Luke", "for John", "for Adolf", on their lips, and very few survivors.

The difficulty is that ends and means are only separable in the limited mental intentionality of the individual. So what purports to be a pragmatic approach to morality falls at the first hurdle. For in reality saving and killing are interchangeable as ends and means. One might say that there are no ends, because the end one has in mind, if achieved, becomes the background means to some new end, just every effect becomes a cause of a new effect.

The counterpoint to the cliche of @TiredThinker's title, "The end justifies the means", is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The two balance out exactly, with no residue of wisdom remaining, as it commonly the case with folk sayings.

So if the end is to end all wars, that justifies the war to end all wars? This was the thinking that 'justified' the most pointless war of all time, WW1. This is the thinking that justifies state torture in America today. It is always a false claim because it is only ever invoked to justify immorality. One Does not need to justify kindness with the intention to better another's life, but one needs to justify cruelty in some such way. The good needs no justification, but only the bad.

It seems that we have become so preoccupied with practicalities that we have lost touch with the abstract and speculative — schopenhauer1

Philosophers are the thought police of consumer society, and materialism declares all such talk useless and therefore meaningless. This is amply demonstrated by the impossibility of understanding the meaning of even the simple word 'modern' without a material definition giving the date of modernity's advent.

Edit: In the sense that the op has used it, I would date 'modern' to be about the end of the Victorian period and to correspond to the abolition of death as a topic in polite society - replaced of course by sex. The awareness of one's mortality is a great stimulus to unpractical speculations.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. — George Orwell, 1984

Meaning is use. These words are meaningless. Therefore you must not use them.

Where once we had a person, now we have baptized them into a schizophrenic: trust the doctor's word over your own feelings. — Moliere

What is interesting is that this is scientific magic. The psychiatrist actually believes his own magic. With marriage, at least civil marriage, we all understand the formal, contractual nature of the event But for the psychiatrist the name is the disease and the disease is real. The better comparison though would be excommunication.