When this came out, I wasn't expecting to get this old. But here I am. And feeling the exact same way about things. That's a hopeful sign, right? "Let's face the music, and dance."

Are you familiar with Pentangle? Best Hippie Rock band to ever exist. — Arcane Sandwich

Well now you are in my happy hunting ground - folk and folk rock. So i can correct you here; the best band ever was the Albion Band.





And in case you like hard core folk:— I used to play some of these tunes on mandolin, a long time ago, in another part of the forest.

That's surprisingly musical. My ignorance of the genre is profound but listening to that dragged this from memory vault of forbidden youth.



Oh and speaking of well kept secrets this was in the dark recesses of the record collection back then:

Have we had this one? Janis Ian. "At Seventeen"

I dunno nothin about metal, but even country folk hate country:

Civil war? How you doing over there, these days?

Here's the thing: this has actually happened already. Eventually, all of the cells of our bodies, even all of our atoms, get replaced by new ones. In that sense, we're like the Ship of Theseus. — Arcane Sandwich

That was my first thought, and then it occurred to me that it also happens that the brain is slowly removed and not replaced, and that is called dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and the like. And far into the process, it seems as if one is still perfectly conscious, even though one has lost one's history, one's habits, one's personality, and one's relationships.

Almost as if every brain were either an Adam or an Eve computing machine and fundamentally identical except in the programming and memory, and consciousness is part of the sameness, not part of the individuality.

It actually inspired in me a new way of looking at quantum mechanics. I would get into it right now, but unfortunately, at the moment, i don't have the time. Perhaps i will at some point in the future. — punos

Cool! The tendency is usually to try to back-project distinctions we make, like that between physics and metaphysics, onto the writing of the ancients, rather than trying to understand how they would project their distinctions -perhaps between heaven and earth, forwards, and the effect of this is that though one calls the result "The Tao of Physics" it is actually more so "The Physics of the Tao.". One praises them for 'guessing right'.

Sartre's unique contribution to the philosophy of consciousness is that it is always what it is not. — Moliere

You'd have to give some details to be sure, but it sounds from that as if Sartre is confusing identity with consciousness, and identity is very much the thought that conflates itself with consciousness. I quite like Sartre, but the suggestion that he might be aligned with Krishnamurti seems almost ludicrous. Sartre's still playing goodies and baddies, even if he asserts that he is making it up like everyone else.

One more, and this time with a lying acceptable image.

I just discovered this man who sings almost like a woman, who was so badly treated by the music industry for most of his life, but liked and respected by some great musicians. So here is another moving performance and a snippet of interview at the end. Apparently he had some unusual hormonal problem that resulted in him never going through puberty completely, and that makes him a threat and an abomination to the rigid thinkers of identity. But you can hear his big big heart...

I prefer The Tao of Pooh.

With humans, you give them food, and they give you shit in return. But with plants, or at least some plants, it's the other way round.

So first become a gardener, and learn to love nature, and when you love shit because it feeds your plants, you can love another human.

Those who want to relate the Tao to either physics or information or logos, might do well to look for those connections in the much older book, the I Ching. And for anyone interested it provides a cultural background that can help understanding.

It is however, difficult and in some ways more like a pack of tarot cards than a work of science or philosophy. But without having to accept the woo, there is still a background of the attempt to make fundamental binary distinctions that in combination can form a way of understanding the universe and man's place in it, beginning with Yin and Yang. And that distinction is even echoed in Mao Tse Tung's comment that 'women hold up half the sky'.

Jung's Introduction to the English translation to Wilhelm's German translation is as gentle an introduction as I can think of.

Or jump head first into the complexity.

World Economic Forum Report.

What the rich are worried about.



https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/

So we cannot be aware of awareness.... at least insofar that awareness is thought?

Is there a non-thought awareness of awareness? — Moliere

I think (awareness is always aware of being aware).

I have basically stolen the notion from J. Krishnamurti, that thought is nothing much to do with awareness. If awareness is considered as 'presence' to the world, it surely becomes clear that thought is secondary, subsequent, and thus always operating on the past as memory. The awareness that can be put into thought and thought about is not awareness but thought.

I want to, or you want me to, talk about life— but talk is dead; thought is mechanical. And this is the hardest lesson for western philosophy and western culture by which I mean to include both Christianity and science (the twins). The heart of things cannot be touched by thought, cannot be understood by thought, and all that AI does is to expose how dead and mechanical we have become, that we mistake our lives for that endless talk that clouds it.

The space between heaven and Earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.
More words count less.
Hold fast to the centre. — Tao Te Ching: 5

How does one hold fast to that which always moves and yields? Hush. Do not say it, find out.

I'd like to join in the mutual appreciations; I've got a deal of reading up to do, and things to think about, and thanks for that. I would have been a bit more forthcoming maybe, but I had a seizure on Boxing day and have been in hospital for tests and scans and then on anti fitting drugs and painkillers for a severe backache.
So I can say from immediate experience that I am not my brain, because my brain is going its own way and doing stuff that I definitely do not approve of, and my body likewise. But I am reading along more or less, and I'll just make a vague comment, somewhat related to this:

Would you say that human experience is a thing-in-itself?
— Moliere

No, I would not. It's in-itself, sure, but it's not a thing in the technical sense. Human experience is not a res. Human experience is more like cogitans in that sense. I would say: there is a human (a res) that has human experiences (cogitans). In other words, we shouldn't think that the cogitans is purely "mental" or "rational", since it is also empirical. — Arcane Sandwich

I find the term 'experience' too ambiguous for the job it has to do here, so I will substitute—

Would you say that human awareness is a thing-in-itself?

And my answer is an emphatic 'yes'. It is the thing in itself; the noumenon into which all phenomena fall. Awareness is like the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, it is the unexperienced source and destination of all experience. Thought cannot touch it, cannot grasp it cannot know it. The confusion of the mechanical process of thought with the silence that is aware of thought and everything else, Is I suspect, the heart of most philosophical difficulties.

So personal identity, then, is the confabulation thought creates in the attempt to stabilise itself as the narrative thread on which identity is built. In the superficial physical world, there are the facts of name, age, medical history, posting history, etc, etc, that is substantially true of a physical body and brain, but that is all merely phenomenal; of the thing in itself, of that which I am and you are, nothing whatsoever can be said.

So, does a stone have an identity? Mu!

Yeah. It's interesting that there is great scepticism of quantum effects in biology, and yet getting them into our phones is a realistic goal.

Hook me up. I want one implanted in my brain.
I wonder if that's how those monarch butterflies find that spot in Mexico. — Metaphysician Undercover

Microtubules. Of course.

A stone has an identity — Arcane Sandwich

It is what it is. If that is all you mean, we have no disagreement. But to say it has something seems to hint at more... ?

Is it something like "Dream big, you can be whatever it is that you want to be"? Or is it instead something like "Reality Itself bends to our mere will, so that with a mere though you can instantly become a different creature, such that you have gills simply because you think so, and you can actually breathe underwater because you think you can". — Arcane Sandwich

Well my ontology is that identity is a thought process and nothing else. To be hard-nosed for a minute, no fish ever thinks it is a fish, it does not identify itself at all, and therefore has no identity. Humans identify stuff including themselves and each other. Reality doesn't bend, it flows. Dreams remain dreams unless they are realised, just as as an architect's plans are fantasies until and unless a builder makes them a reality. Now we can argue about whether an architect whose plans are never built is a "real" architect or not, but identities as fantasies certainly have potential.

I can think that I am a fish. That doesn't mean that I am a fish. — Arcane Sandwich

Well that is a question of identity politics. Some people like to lay down the law about what are legitimate identities, but the recognised identities do seem to change over time and between cultures to an extent at least. Who knows if gill reassignment will or won't become an option?

Humans and hurricanes have something in common: both of them are event-based objects, in Carmichael's (2015) sense of the term. — Arcane Sandwich

Or to put it another way, they are both temporary, mutable, evolving objects. I'm all for a bit of common sense now and then. And depending on the time-scale, mountains continents and pretty much every object is temporary, mutable and evolving.

∃x(Cxm ∧ Bxt) - There exist an x, such that x was a caterpillar on Monday, and it is a butterfly on Tuesday. You just need to treat Monday and Tuesday as individual constants, and "being a caterpillar" and "being a butterfly" as two-place predicates that relate an individual to a moment in time. — Arcane Sandwich

Of course, one can account for these things, but in general, logic is mainly conducted in the present eternal tense, as it has been in this thread, and that is the practice I am criticising

I am unenlightened, but tomorrow I will be enlightened. No problem, but will anyone want to say that unenlightened is enlightened, even if they are willing to say tomorrow that enlightened was unenlightened. It can be made to work, but it isn't without difficulties.

Ok, this isn't a backroad, it's the cutting edge of the superhighway to the future. This is highly recommended as a great explanation of theoretical and practical quantum physics and if you don't think you learn anything from watching it, I will personally give you your time back.

I was trying to clarify rather than equivocate, but obviously you seem to be unenlightened on the semantics. — Corvus

Oh ha ha! You made a little joke about my handle! No one ever did that before; I should have thought about that when I chose the label.

Descartes famously said Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. — Arcane Sandwich

I think therefore I am whatever I think. I am the thought of myself. I am the result of the distinction I make between myself and the world. But this is obviously wrong. I am, therefore, whatever I mistake myself for.

But in being someone, I am something. I am something in the following sense:

∃x(x=a) - There exists an x, such that x is identical to Arcane Sandwich. — Arcane Sandwich

Will you say, "There exists an x, such that x is identical to a named hurricane."? We talk about them as objects for convenience, but we do not draw the boundaries or wonder where they go when they dissipate. The problem with formal logic is that it cannot deal with time.
Yesterday, there existed an x, such that was identical to unenlightened.
Today, there exists a y, such that y is now identical to unenlightened, but somewhat changed from x.
Tomorrow, who knows, there may exist a z such that z is then identical to the mortal remains of unenlightened, but is radically different from x and y in being lifeless. Or maybe z will be enlightened. :joke:

We can't record it really, and the defense of poetics falls to the same narcissism as the defense of science.

Yeah? Or naw? — Moliere

Yeah.
"The record that can be recorded is not the continuing record."
"Work is done and then forgotten; therefore it lasts forever."
ETC.

What would a non-narcissistic philosophy look like, in your opinion? — Moliere

Lao Tzu.

↪Arcane Sandwich unenlightened -- looks like we've come to a similar path you've described: that identity serves as a kind of "center" for philosophy at large. — Moliere

Hmm. "Philosopher" is an identity that identifies itself as central. But then that goes for any old narcissist too. But that's ok with me, because I am happy to say that I am the real Donald Trump, or a 17thC French playwright, or a harvest mouse. I am any centre anywhere.

Likewise, the world exists with no colour changes, whether you wore brown sunglasses or not. — Corvus

Again your expression equivocates; The world does not have any absolute colour independently of the visual apparatus and the ambient light. When I am a bee, I can see ultraviolet, by starlight I can see only monochrome. Colour is not a term of physics, but of vision. Looking through a microscope does not change the world, but it changes what can be seen; colour is a feature of what can be seen and it changes.

Endo-symbiosis. Feel the love.

Some cases of sensory disorder of few folks shouldn't change how the the external world objects look and smell in general. Should they? Of course, if you wear brown sunglasses, and look into the world, it will look brown. But you wouldn't say, now the whole world is brown, would you? — Corvus

No, I would say the whole world looks brown, not the whole world is brown. You are equivocating here how things look and how things are, which is exactly what the language is distinguishing. :yikes:

We don't say my experience looks red, or my nose smells nice. — Corvus

And yet some of us are colourblind, and some have lost their sense of smell and we do not blame the rose. Normal people talk about the world directly, and not about their experiences at all. One often talks about experience as a non-philosopher when one begins to doubt one's senses. "A common symptom of covid is the experience of a smell of burning." This does not mean that spontaneous combustion tends to occur around covid sufferers.

I already argued for beauty and ugliness to be an intrinsic feature of experience in OP so they are objective (person-independent). What is left are like and dislike that are subjective so person-dependent and therefore extrinsic. — MoK

The redness of the rose belongs to the rose, not to me or my experience.
— Corvus
No, the redness of the rose is constructed by your brain. The flower does not have any particular color at all so it is just the feature of your experience. — MoK

The aromatic hydrocarbons belong to the rose, but the smell belongs to the nose. The reflective and absorbent signature belongs to the petals, but the redness is in the eye of the beholder.

But here, I think you have gone astray right at the beginning by talking about "experience". Surely experience is always at least mediated by senses, sensitivities and sensibilities?

I think that attractiveness is the extrinsic feature of the experience whereas handsomeness is the intrinsic one. — MoK

Well yes, I assumed that was what you wanted to say. But I was hoping you'd have some argument or rationale for saying it.

What sets aesthetic experiences apart from other experiences is not intrinsic and extrinsic features but the fact that some experiences are attractive (or deterrent) for their own sake regardless of whether it serves other interests. — jkop

Yes, I've heard that before in latin — "De gustibus non est disputandum" But that is rather wider than is being suggested here, and still both too vague and too unreasoned to be very helpful.

I'm tempted to suggest that the distinction being groped for here is between subjective and objective, such that matters of taste are to do with the subject, whereas matters of fact are features of the object. But therein lies a whole can of worms if not a pit of vipers.

That is an excellent question! I think like and dislike for example are extrinsic features of our experience. Let me give you an example: A man could be handsome but he would not be sexually attractive to you since you are straight. Does that make sense to you? I am open to discuss this. — MoK

Great example! I feel the same way about goats. But is it that I am blind to the sexual attractiveness of goats, whereas other goats can appreciate the intrinsic attractiveness, or is it that attractiveness is in some essential way relative to the observer, where handsomeness is not? How can one tell the difference?

As distinguished from extrinsic features of our experience? What would they be?

It seems to me that if the argument works for beauty and ugliness, then it works for any other features of experience - veridical and illusory, or married and unmarried, for examples. Which would be inconvenient, if the intention is to say something about aesthetics that distinguishes it from science or mundanity.

I see this discussion as highlighting Trump the person. I see Trump as symptomatic of the control of our political system by large corporations. — alleybear

That's about right. Government reduced to entertainment "The Economy" reduced to "The Oligarchs".

Thought rather tends to confuse itself with awareness; but one can be aware without any movement of thought, and one can think without much awareness too.