Not so much a philosopher, more a snake oil salesman taking advantage of our free site.

Things are such that there's no such thing as 'no such thing'.

Which pile of words establishes no more than that there is a pile of words.

Thus to ask why there is something rather than nothing is clearly something rather than nothing; and that is why, whenever it is asked, there is something and not nothing. Try to imagine no one repetitively asking why there is nothing rather than something. It never happens.

Perhaps stop thinking about religion as primarily a set of beliefs that become more credible in proportion to their internal consistency.

Instead, treat religions as practices in the first place, that might sometimes justify themselves with tales of other realms and other beings, and dogma of all sorts. Ask first what these communities do: do they look after the old women in their community, for instance, or do they like to set fire to them? The different reasons they give for sati or witch-burning seem less important than the commonality of the practice of setting (unwanted) women on fire.

Commendable work. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well no. That is rather the point. What I was doing politically 50 years ago had some small local success, but overall the problem of homelessness and poor housing has gotten much worse. My efforts were useless in the face of a society that does not look after its weaker members as well as a bunch of heathen tribal primitives who are by comparison desperately poor and highly irrational.

I think your praise or blame offered to me rather exemplifies the root of the difficulty. You do not even see what a terrible inditement of our society it is that we cannot, despite our enormous wealth and sophistication, even feed and house ourselves adequately to the climate. The callousness of our society comes very much out of this kind of attitude of moralising the individual, and making the relation between the individual and society one that presumes the moral justice of social circumstance, and thus blames the weak for their weakness, whether it be disability, lack of education, mental illness, addiction, or mere accident.

It's a cop-out. We do - because we use political pressure to ensure it gets done. — ZzzoneiroCosm

You know me so well. I did my stint as a volunteer for the Cyrenians, many years ago, and later formed a residents association in Leeds that succeeded in getting about 150 homes taken off the condemned housing list where they had been languishing for twenty years and got them all refurbished and brought up to standard. But now I take a back seat and seek to understand the state of humanity that needs pressure to be applied before it will treat its neighbours with simple decency. I have become lazy and apathetic.

If you understand why you don't build said houses (and instead play philosophy on the internet) then you understand why we don't. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I don't think so. I don't build roads or power stations, but we do. Building even a small house is a big undertaking for one old man, but for a town of ten thousand, 50 houses would not be difficult or unaffordable. Your logic does not work, because one person is almost helpless, but a community is potentially a whole army.

I connect this vaguely to our atomization. I get used to walking by the homeless lady who just settled on the sidewalk a block from where I live. I go on my own little way, minding my own business. This isn't all bad. It's connected with a vivid and differentiated society. But it's dangerous, for reasons you've emphasized. — igjugarjuk

Here is a nice piece of anthropology about this crazy tribe who worship The Duke of Edinburgh. Hard for us to understand that, but when they visited us, they could not understand why, if people were homeless, we did not build houses for them. And I cannot understand it either. In fact in my town, during covid lockdown they did provide little homes prefab in the town carpark. But now they've removed them again so the cars can have their home back.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/meet-the-natives

I hope you will be able to access it.

In the US there's a strange terrible background of hate and yet for the most part the usual scene at the grocery store. So I like to think that it's still just a morbid minority that's completely lost that basic trust and therefore trustworthiness, since the paranoid can 'justify' extreme measures in the light of the misperceived extreme threat. — igjugarjuk

Elsewhere I have suggested that hatred is a secondary emotion, typically a response to a primary emotion of hurt or fear. I imagine that fear is ever-present at the store and at the school, and at the council office over there, judging by the news we see of shootings. It seems, rather like global warming, that there are tipping points into a positive feedback loop where the lunatics take over the asylum, and the crazies drive us all crazy, to the extent that armed teachers in primary schools looks like a sensible policy. Though the bombs are falling, yet we still need groceries, and even that becomes mundane.

I don't understand how you're connecting trust and truth here at all. I might trust implicitly someone who is not telling the truth. The two seem unrelated. — Isaac

Yes. Trust is the default because we are born helpless and have to trust. And this continues to be the case even when we are betrayed. You can trust me that I have made the connection even if you cannot quite see it:- until you find out that I have made it up in order to deceive you, at which point you stop attending to what I say if you have any sense. Because the betrayal of truth has become so commonplace amongst advertisers, politicians, and the media, we no longer trust them and their messages lose their meaning. The language itself starts to lose its meaning. Paper money is a written promise that the bank will pay the amount specified, and if the promise becomes a lie, the money has no value. Economists call it "confidence". Folks have to tell the truth to maintain our confidence; the government governs be being believed when, for example it makes laws and specifies penalties.

I am saying, not that truth and trust are the same, but that truth is required to maintain trust. The foundation of society is in flows of information and mutual support that is founded on trust, and when there is no trust, there is no society and no government, but only mafia gangs and paranoid individuals.

Philosophers have thrown away thousands of years of laborious effort in building societies through the development of moral systems that include formal and informal controls to inhibit dishonesty and to foster trust. We cannot communicate without the trust that folks mean what they say, but we have to painfully relearn that sometimes they don't. And relearn also that the best response to this is neither to resort to torture in the vain attempt to force the truth from a liar, nor to elect liars to high office.

I cannot see any way in which trustworthiness somehow gives one access to the truth. — Isaac

Trust give access to another. Trust me, because otherwise nothing I say has any meaning; tell the truth, because otherwise nothing you say has any meaning.

Why do people seek their own repression under authoritarian regimes when it is clearly against their own self and class interests?

It must be clear to anyone with eyes that Reich's psychology of fascism applies to left and right equally.

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

It is a betrayal of the whole of civilisation, and the whole of community, because it destroys communication, which is the foundation of every social enterprise. Money, at least paper money and digital money consists of promissory notes, and has the value of the trust that is invested in it. Trust is the primary value.


It is not just psychology, but even more so, philosophy, that has betrayed ordinary people by allowing moral nihilism and subjectivism to become dominant in society. The myth of the free independent individual, who does not need society because he has a bulging wallet; it's a joke really, because the bulging wallet is made of mutual trust in what without it would not even make good toilet paper. And with that paper the independent individual buys all the thousands of goods and services of society on which his whole life depends, from farmers, cooks, mechanics, plumbers, tailors, security staff, etc etc.

If it is clear, that even the very special people are totally dependent on the whole fabric of a complex industrial society, that has a medium of exchange founded on trust, then the betrayal of truth by manipulation can be seen as an attack on the very foundation of society.

And this perhaps answers the question as clearly as any psychological theory of sexual energy. Communication breaks down because the prevalence of lies means that no word of anyone can be trusted. One is taught to buy stuff not because the stuff is worth it, but because "You are worth it", whatever that means. One cannot trust the pension fund, the health insurance, the job stability, that the bank will not repossess the house, that the writ of law will run; the people that run all these things are unreliable and have no honour. The loss of communication and the loss of trust is the collapse of society into chaos. And in that chaos, one looks for a saviour who seems to speak the truth. Maybe it is all those Mexicans after all, there's certainly more of them than there were in the good old days. Or maybe it's the Jews. Or the nazis, or the communists, or... There is no condition more vulnerable to manipulation than that of radical loss of trust and the resulting paranoia. He who believes nothing will believe anything.

A search for truth involves pointing out problems and flaws in belief. — Art48

No it doesn't. You have come up completely empty handed on the truth front. You have dismissed beliefs you never held, in favour of nothing at all. The truth dividend is zero.

... perspectives about the purpose of education in society. It seems that there are two competing ideas — Paulm12

Education is the reproductive system of a culture.

- the idea that education should serve to teach people specific skills to be productive in society and conform, and the idea that education should encourage people to come up with new ideas and think independently. — Paulm12

Train the peasants to conform and obey; educate the leaders to plan and command. That you hear two conflicting ideas an indication that you live in a stratified society -a class system.

Everyone claims indoctrination from the other. — Hanover

As if it was a bad thing. As if there were a society or an education that did not indoctrinate its young with the traditions and mores it inherited. [Sarcasm]Like this forum, for example, which does not encourage folks to read the guidelines or limit themselves to certain topics, and forms of discussion very much at all. [/sarcasm]

Here is a song about the end of humanity in a Nuclear War. The last line echoes

Does not matter one way or the other. — Jackson

But it does so with huge passion, great beauty and sadness. In the end, it doesn't matter, we can go for a last walk together in the radioactive morning dew, But it sure as fuck matters that in the end it doesn't matter, because it is not the case that

we have brought about nothing but destruction and catastrophe on this planet. — TheSoundConspirator

Our destructiveness cannot justify our destroying ourselves. We have brought destruction and catastrophe, but also this:-

Excellent opening post. I hope this will develop.

I'm not all that familiar with Hegel or Brandom, but I cannot resist chipping in a little, and I will try to follow along and educate myself.

"bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism" (p. 108). On the objective side, therefore, incompatible contents -- such as "being a mammal" and "being a reptile" -- cannot be conjoined in one object, whereas consequential relations between contents -- such as "being a mammal" and "being a vertebrate" -- must hold. Brandom calls these relations between objective conceptual contents "alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence" (p. 60). On the subjective side, one can take an animal to be both a mammal and a reptile -- because we can get things wrong, and because we are (at least to some extent) free beings -- but we ought not to do so. By contrast, we ought to take a mammal to be a vertebrate, whether we do so or not: "one is committed or obliged to do so"

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/

Reminded me of Umberto Eco : https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WPyz8ikWrsEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

Lays eggs and has a beak = bird: suckles its young and has fur = mammal.

Aristotle starts with a classification system based on similarity and difference; a matter of aesthetics and a vague notion of what characteristics are more fundamental or superficial, and 2000 years later, Darwin proposes that this system is accounted for by literal common ancestry. And now we can measure that relatedness systematically such that our classification system has become the story of evolution.

It's conceivable that other animals have simpler versions of 'scorekeeping.' I can imagine a particular chimp being treated as an exaggerator or an understater. — igjugarjuk

They can lie!



This is surely the beginning of language and the beginning of morality? Communicative social representation gives rise to the possibility of deliberate misrepresentation in order to manipulate, but that possibility cannot become the norm, because the presentational meaning would be lost. When everyone lies, language simply doesn't work any more and becomes mere noise. Thus one can choose to deceive, but one cannot chose deception to be the norm, it has to be honesty.

Thee and me can see our bitterness, and our unenlightenedness because we are not entirely dead to another being. Thus we feel our hypocrisy and are ashamed. Rotten to the core is dead to the other and comes to believe their own bullshit. Shamelessness is the key to saying sorry, admitting fault, admitting being wrong, without remotely thinking that such things ought to be consequential except for the purposes of manipulating others. The hollowness is all there is.

But you should probably ask Hannah - I say what I see, and she was looking at something or someone (I think similar) in a different world.

some of Johnson's recent moves have been commendable — Wayfarer

No. His moves are always and solely directed towards his own image and his own status.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. — Hannah Arendt

What is the point of inventing distasteful and unlikely dogmatic theologies, and then tut tutting at them?

Would you not be better employed trying to think of ways that life can be meaningful and worth the living?

When did the idea that people are obligated to discuss religion and politics to every troll become the rule.
— Hanover

It depends on the person, I see myself strong enough to speak freely and, most important, to entertains ANY ideas freely. For everybody, of course, it is different. — M777

Clearly not, you feel like folks are trolling you, and you're trying to ignore them. And then you complain that the man in the street treats you the same way.

Excellent! Try not to tense up.

↪unenlightened No, I certainly don't support the gender-theory or any of such movements. — M777

But you want to silence me, and you want to silence @Streetlight.

Are you one of them bullies you were talking about?

Well, since you ask so politely, a woman is an organic penis sheath. As every schoolboy imagines.

How? They cannot have another no confidence vote for a year. They knew this when they voted today; they chose who will lead them into the next election. — karl stone

They can change the rules, or push him under a bus; or 'exert some pressure', as they did with Thatcher and with May. I don't know how it works, bribery, blackmail, brainwashing?

Johnson won 60/40 - near enough; and now he's safe for the next 12 months. — karl stone

In theory. In practice, he's an election liability and the Tories are likely to find a way to get rid before the next election, which means in the next year. There is no way they want to get to election year with a new no-confidence vote looming.

Bring back monarchy, at least there's a chance of getting a decent leader.

The killer for Johnson is that Brexit is unravelling. It could only have worked for Ireland if we had basically a free trade deal with the EU, that May negotiated, and that's what Boris was brought in to prevent. Unfortunately, the other alternatives turn out to be either a trade war with Europe or a return to civil war in Ireland, or both.

It's rare for a conservative leader to actually lose a vote of confidence, but for most not winning by a large margin is enough to make them resign fairly quickly. However, Boris is another matter. I have even seen the suggestion that if he scrapes a win, he might call a snap election and lose all his detractors their seats, in a political mutual assured destruction gesture - Après moi, le déluge. The is very unlikely, but an unedifying attempt to cling to power is quite on the cards. There are a couple of by-elections coming up that he is set to lose too, and that will be concentrating minds, so it is just possible that he will actually lose the confidence vote outright. (This is an internal party vote not a full government vote in which the other parties also get to vote.)

In your nature/man/God division, the above distinguishes between nature and man, but not God. — Hanover

One can make the distinction because God. This is the story of the enlightenment. Leave God out of things, and then man is an animal indistinguishable from nature, and morals are 'subjective' aka. fiction. Meaning is lost and all the philosophers thereafter are trying to sort out the mess.

The point here is that we do need to talk about elves and angels if we want to maintain the natural/supernatural distinction. — Hanover

No, not at all. This is the materialist's finest folly, to look for the supernatural in nature and then declare it absent. Man is the image of god in the world, and it is in the judgement, caring, and moral discernment of man that the supernatural is manifested in the world, not some sky god's thunderbolt, operating on tree trunks for the convenience of the traveller. It is the intrusion of moral awareness into material sensitivity that is the unnatural miracle.

Don't read this as a suggestion that because the term supernatural is useful and non-empty that there must be elves. I'm not uttering objects into existence. — Hanover

As I was saying earlier, one does not need to posit elves, angels or miracles. Rather, one posits human subjectivity as a moral dimension that is distinct from nature. This preserves the old meaning of the term "nature" as excluding the man-made, because humans have 'a higher nature'. Which is to say that we are not slaves to our physicality. At which point the miracle is that we can tend to the physical.

When Bankei was preaching at Ryumon temple, a Shinshu priest, who believed in salvation through the repitition of the name of the Buddha of Love, was jealous of his large audience and wanted to debate with him.

Bankei was in the midst of a talk when the priest appeared, but the fellow made such a disturbance that bankei stopped his discourse and asked about the noise.

"The founder of our sect," boasted the priest, "had such miraculous powers that he held a brush in his hand on one bank of the river, his attendant held up a paper on the other bank, and the teacher wrote the holy name of Amida through the air. Can you do such a wonderful thing?"

Bankei replied lightly: "Perhaps your fox can perform that trick, but that is not the manner of Zen. My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink."

https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/80therealmiracle.html

We are both ok with that, yes? — universeness

Sadly, it seems you are. I can only leave you to your nonsense at this point.

If you see the contents of my posts on this thread as obvious truths then... — universeness

Sadly not. That nonexistents don't exist is fairly obvious, but it is equally obvious that you can refer to them, because you keep doing so.

I am trying to convince others that nonexistents don't exist — universeness

You'll be telling us next that the pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods. :cool:

Logically, 'nothing,' cannot have a reference to it. — universeness

Why do you keep referring to it?

some species seem to be extremely vulnerable while others seem to be completely invulnerable. — Agent Smith

Appearances can be deceptive. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/deeptime/low_bandwidth.html

It is not possible to refer to nothing. — universeness

Your statement here is performative contradiction. Go and ask your bank what it means to have nothing in your account, and they will explain it to you.

'the supernatural does not exist' or 'god does not exist,' just like anyone else is prone to emotive commentary but I will normally reduce that to something less emotive such as 'well, I am strongly convinced that the supernatural or/and gods don't exist.' If you push further then I will state my 'level of conviction indicator,' as the by now, well-known and emotive, 99.9% — universeness

Yes, that is depressingly normal. So if the supernatural does not exist, it seems to follow that everything is natural. And this means that the term 'natural' does not make a distinction such that some things are natural, and some things are supernatural. And that means that in saying X is natural, one is not saying anything about X. One simply cannot have one half of a distinction and not the other half - left without right, true without false, this is how concepts work, by carving the world up.

Saying 'everything is natural' is equivalent to saying 'everything is', and the term 'natural' adds nothing, because it has no meaning. But you continue to use the term as if you are saying something profound, and as you say, deeply felt. It's not your fault, it's the result of the religious thinking out of which science was born and which it now usurps without much understanding.

If you would like to make a small adjustment that would save the situation at almost no cost to your scientistic philosophy, you simply say that you have no knowledge of the supernatural. This is called 'agnosticism', and allows you to be sceptical of other folk's claims about the supernatural and yet keep the meaning of the natural world coherent. At this point, the supernatural does indeed become 'whereof one cannot speak', but one cannot speak to deny or affirm.

Better to notice the limits of ourselves and be content with some vagueness in our talk, because one cannot fit the world exactly in one's mind. — unenlightened

Another way of putting this is to say that our ideas map the world, but a map is useful only to the extent that it leaves out all the fine details and radically simplifies everything. A road becomes a line, and the abandoned shoe on the verge is ignored.

“Supernatural” means above and beyond the natural world. It’s a valid, internally consistent concept. It’s also an empty, useless concept because we do not know the limits of the natural. — Art48

This seems problematic to me. Consider the term, "Shoreline". I think it is a useful term that designates the extent of an island. Yet it turns out on examination that its length is indeterminate because it is fractal, and it is constantly changing because of the tides. But this makes "island" an empty, useless concept because we do not know the limits. Better to notice the limits of ourselves and be content with some vagueness in our talk, because one cannot fit the world exactly in one's mind.

To deny meaning to "supernatural" is equivalent to claiming that "all is one" (all is natural), which, ironically, is very much the cry of the mystic.

How would you explain the situation we're in? — Agent Smith

The interconnectedness of all thing is called 'ecology'. Diversity produces resilience, because it allows more adaptation to changes in environment. Conversely, a monoculture is unstable because it is vulnerable to change in the form of pathogen, predator, or change in climate.

Humans are such a monoculture and prey to

(flies, roaches, mice, rats, mosquitoes) — Agent Smith

that can exploit us. In looking after ourselves, we also create a paradise for those that prey on us, and in eliminating our competitors for food - caterpillars, slugs, carnivores, etc, we eliminate the competitors of those that exploit us. Cats catch mice, birds eat bugs.

Well, I doubt I can make it any clearer for you, but as a matter of fact, the enlightenment leads to modernism, and modernism to post modernism. That is to say, 'truth' as a natural phenomenon cannot be distinguished from delusion, as a natural phenomenon. You have removed a leg of the tripod on which civilisation has been built, and have not quite noticed that the whole edifice has come tumbling down.

↪unenlightened Not sure what your point is. — Tom Storm

Here's the simplified version: a word has meaning by virtue of referring to something and not referring to other things. Thus if 'supernatural' refers to nothing, 'natural' refers to everything, and both terms lose their meaning. Thus science as 'the study of nature' simply becomes science as 'study'.

@Tom storm and @universeness suffer from enlightenment. It's highly infectious and most people here have it. The ancient regime had a triple concept at its root of God, Man, and Nature. (Or the supernatural, the human, and the natural.) Having a three legged philosophy is always a good idea for stability, and it is easy to see that as soon as the supernatural is eliminated, the distinction between man and nature collapses, and 'natural' becomes nothing but a comfortable advertising term, with as little meaning as supernatural.

Science can do without the term and just study phenomena, but then has to replace indistinguishable 'man and nature' with indistinguishable 'subjective and objective', or indistinguishable 'observer and observation'.