I'm finding everything uniformly good. Three seemed a little dense with the catalog of characters and titles, but I think it reflects that world. As I mentioned elsewhere, the Habermas I'm reading analyzed exactly the nature of the salon as a forum for the meeting and melding of the aristocratic and plebian\creative spheres and ideologies, it was rewarding to read them in parallel.

À la recherche du temps perdu #4: Sodom and Gomorrah
by Marcel Proust

I was referring to "us" as the condition of human uncertainty faced (or ignored) by each person, making philosophy our ticket to seeing our part (and with others), thus bettering our response, ourselves. — Antony Nickles

I think this is the basis for a kind of meliorism, versus pessimism. I would typify myself as a melioristic naturalist.

to the extent philosophy is tempted to remove our responsibility to ourself — Antony Nickles

Yes, as I embrace the spirit of Naturalism, I see myself as an agent of the the universe. So my greatest moral duty is maximize my own potentials and my contributions to society.

So would it be fair to say you see philosophy itself as kind of enlightened humanism?

In the same way that Kant says the "prohibition of publicity impedes the progress of a people toward improvement" I think the evident corruption of the proper functioning of the public sphere (due to contamination by dominant-exclusive interests) is not only a detriment to socio-cultural progress but a contributor to socio-cultural decay.

That is a central and timeless point. Can I contribute to society if I myself don't see the world clearly? If I merely read books about social struggles but never exercise my own mind in a real, live social struggle, I rob my own development, misfiring in my attempts to contribute to society. — Experience of Clarity

What is your answer?

Right, in the same way that my hallucination most certainly exists. — Metaphysician Undercover

The hallucination is that you are hallucinating.

You can call an atom a thing if you want. Things are systems of a very basic or maybe well-understood kind. The point was you said an atom had a purely theoretical and not a real existence, which is absurd. Maybe the theoretical concept of an atom doesn't correspond in toto to the actuality, but that is a limitation of perception and representation that doesn't eliminate the underlying correlation of the intentional object and the reality it intends towards. You can't perceive a "season" but seasons most certainly exist. Our mind simply does not operate in the requisite dimensions to intuitively apprehend seasonality as an object. Some people can intuit the objective reality of complex spatial relationships that are not centered on themselves, while many can't. That's how the heliocentric-model (theory) came to be. And it took a long time. People are stubborn in their limited perceptions sometimes.

You obviously have no education in basic chemistry, so you take the route of dfpolis, deny the facts and ignore the reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that is the obvious fact here. My education must have gaping holes in it. Much more obvious than the facticty of atoms being evident qua properties in the external world which we experience constantly.

An "atom" is a theoretical representation. Atoms do not have independent existence in nature, — Metaphysician Undercover

Ye are quite mad lad. Bon voyage, enjoy the ride! :)

A "system" is a whole, and as such it requires a boundary, or principle at least, which validates its supposed existence as a united whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Systems are functional entities characterized specifically by their differentiation with respect to an environment and their stability, among other things.

If a system isn't a real thing then certainly, by your logic, there are no real things. An atom is a system. And yes, it is an 'arbitrary' boundary if by that you mean at some point the atom didn't exist and at some point it will cease to exist. Again, if that is your definition of arbitrary, then we live in a Heraclitean world and the only thing that really exists is change.

Do you accept that a "system" is an artificial thing? So any experiments carried with a system are designed and ordered by the engineers of the system, therefore not necessarily giving a proper representation of what is natural. — Metaphysician Undercover

Systems are absolutely a fundamental feature of natural reality. I completely espouse Laszlo's perspective that the systems theoretic framework is a paradigm shift in conceptualizing the nature of reality, one which handily absorbs pseudo-problems like that of mind-matter, since mind-matter systems demonstrably exist and can be evaluated in systems-theoretic terms.

If anything, the relationship between "purely" artificial systems - qua models - and natural systems is of key interest to me.

I am using ChatGPT more as a way of fleshing out my own thoughts, as I'm already well-acquainted with the details of almost every answer it gives. However it does catch some stuff, and it even presents interesting novel points once in a while. The philosophical content is in my questions/statements, to which the responses are usually parenthetical.

The only thing with intelligence in the entire galaxy is humanity. — Leftist

That's a huge assumption that only illustrates the limitations of human knowledge. It originates from an core orientation of philosophical pessimism which in itself has no basis. One can just as easily adopt an original philosophical optimism, one that recognizes even in our tiny little speck of existence a huge spectrum of intelligence. This leads to the conclusion that, not only are there probably other intelligences, there are probably other intelligences far more advanced than our own.

Wikipedia tells me "In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality." Care to state your case? — Metaphysician Undercover

I actually covered a lot of my views relating thermodynamics and information theory by way of cybernetics in the dialog with ChatGPT I just posted in the Lounge. There is a lot of preamble because I needed to contextualize the discussion to make sure the neural net was weighting things correctly. The history of the conversation appears to change the nature of the response to any given question.

There is an additional portion to the chat I had subsequently that brings in the concept of analog computing, which is interesting because in it information is instantiated as form/structure. I might take that a bit further so I haven't appended it to the main dialog yet.

For my own interests, mostly the "manifest image" of everyday life, I think there's a lot of interesting ground that could be covered by an epistemological oriented metaphysics, as exemplified by C.I. Lewis and more recently by Raymond Tallis. — Manuel

This is very interesting and prima facie not in my acquaintance. Thanks for sharing!!

Whitehead was my personal preference, because I happen to think process philosophy is a powerful concept. I hoped that people would feel free to recast using their personal exemplars... :)

Right now I'm having fun with ChatGPT for free. I realized that, as a neural net, its primary operation consists of processing data through a layer of "hidden neurons" that basically function to tease out abstract similarities between inputs, which can be equated with concepts since the architecture is software implemented. It seems pretty responsive to novel input - I got it to revise its use of certain concepts - uncommon versus unusual - and the revisions stuck between chat sessions, even though it doesn't retain data from session to session by its own account. It was also willing to define new functional terms. It offered me the operation of "dual response" when I asked it to provide me the option to compare its first runner-up response the to one it actually selected, and to give me an easy way to ask it to do that.

So I'm going to start chatting around some philosophical concepts, hylomorphism, dualism, the mind-body problem, and see what this "abstraction engine" can dredge up. A platonic dialog of anamnesis with an AI I guess you could say....

the number of ways macroscopic properties can be microscopically instantiated -- for that is what entropy describes. — Dfpolis

Interesting. I have heard entropy characterized as the tendency to disorder or randomness, negentropy as the opposite. I'm also familiar with the information-theoretic usage, which some people believe overlaps. Order arises out of disorder, it's a natural(istic) fact.

I just reviewed the entire thread, didn't find any reference to the microscopic instantiation of macroscopic properties (other than when you brought it up just now).

Of course this is repugnant to the rational mind, to think that order could emerge from disorder, — Metaphysician Undercover

Maybe I'm just naive, but how is the well-documented physical phenomenon/fact of negentropy not in and of itself sufficient evidence of this?

I like to say, perspective is everything. Asking what is the point of anything sounds like more of an emotional than an intellectual response. The alternate perspective is to see yourself as an apex product of billions of years of evolution. In a not-insignificant sense you absolutely are this universe from which you at the moment feel so alienated. Explore that possibility....


:up:

Thanks, noted. I read Descartes' Error, I preferred Damasio's Error though.... :naughty:
I am still keen to read Jaworski on hylomorphism. I'll just have to bite the bullet.
edit: Jaworski's 2011 book Philosophy of Mind is available on Archive.org . Noice.

Thanks for the feedback @Nickolasgaspar. Like you, I'm motivated to try to find application of philosophical concepts where they can be of most benefit. If "publicity" has contributed to the rapid advancement to and of modernity then we should certainly be leery of the manipulation of the public sphere by special interests, if that impairs its "proper" function.

Interestingly, the next chapter talks about the evolution of the public sphere through the medium of salons and coffee-houses. I'm also concurrently reading Prousts' Rememberance of Things Past, and one of the major recurring themes throughout the first 3 books (as far as I have gotten) is the role of the salon, the interplay between intellect and aristocracy. It's like a case-study of Habermas! A happy accident.

I agree with this last part. I think of philosophy as a diversity of approaches for not taking anything for granted. — Tom Storm

So as a kind of mental training or discipline? I would one-hundred percent endorse that.

Gilles Deleuze et al ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spinozist_philosophers
It may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.
— G.W.F. Hegel
:fire: — 180 Proof

Would you say that Spinozaism constitutes a "philosophical system", such that "philosophical systematicity" could be considered a category? Is the exemplariness of Spinoza's work a function of its systematicity?

So, which branch of philosophy serves as an example of philosophy that clarifies … what exactly? What philosophy is, maybe? — Jamal

Well hermeneutics perhaps. But then, is that a philosophy, or a tool? Depends who you read. Ricouer covers a lot of ground, and he uses hermeneutics liberally.

No doubt, there is a rabbit-hole there. If you don't feel that it is possible to create a category along the lines I did - primary tradition and recent exponent - I get it.

I wonder, though, if there is a philosophical reason I like them, rather than just a personal reason -- which I'd be more apt to believe the personal reason, it'd be interesting if there was some underlying philosophical aesthetic that makes these choices the choices we're thinking about, too. — Moliere

If your personal aesthetic is philosophical, then your personal reasons might also be?

More charitably, I suppose it can be interpreted to mean “which of these is the most philosophical?” Or “the most typical of philosophy”. — Jamal

Yes. Although, not to quibble, but isn't the entire point of providing an example to clarify? For example, I could provide the truth tables for inclusive versus exclusive disjunctions, which may not be very informative to some people. Or I can offer you can't have your cake and eat it too as an example of an exclusive disjunction, which is much clearer.

Gilles Deleuze et al ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Spinozist_philosophers
It may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.
— G.W.F. Hegel
:fire: — 180 Proof

:up:

I agree, and I considered creating a very broad category of "Philosophical Systems" for such radically different thinkers as Hegel, Locke, Schopenhauer. Philosophies of great scope, depth and, well, systematicity. I am a big fan of a system. Even if it has flaws, a system represents a great investment of effort.

Because “exemplifies” and even “best exemplifies” are a bit vague, won’t this just devolve to picking favourites, or answering as to which is most important? — Jamal

I don't consider exemplification to be a vague concept. Wouldn't you agree that the premise of exemplification is to illustrate and clarify?

Hmmm. Maybe I should have said contemporary. Do you think there are any contemporary heirs to the tradition of Spinoza?

The reason I didn't pick metaphysical is that I think the phenomenological subject exemplifies the most metaphysically interesting aspects of reality. But then I think that subject is relevant through the mechanism of the social-weltanschauung.

Who would you cite as a modern exponent of the Metaphysical-Ethical tradition?

I wanted to pick Metaphysical because I have a sinister preoccupation with the ultimate nature of reality. But I also went the social route. As you say, elements of the various traditions comingle....

The rise of liberalism in Europe was clearly an egalitarian project in its infancy. Money was the great equalizer. Do you agree with that? — frank

I'm not sure that I do. By all accounts, things were a lot more equal before money. Money facilitated first trade, but then capitalism, which definitely does not contribute to egalitarianism through its own nature. Capitalism concentrates wealth through money.

As I mentioned elsewhere, it certainly seems like revolutions initially involve the hard-core "have-nots" and their ideological supporters who are better off. Then, at a certain point, when things start to get really messy, a certain class of people swing to the reactionary side (i.e. aligning with entrenched power and interests) to suppress the implementation of a more far-reaching equality.

I think these 'swing-votes' lie in the hands of what I would call the best-paid proletariat. Doctors, for example, have to work hard at what they do in order to be really good. If they didn't work hard, they wouldn't be good doctors. So as paid workers, they really are part of proletariat. And the elite (like everyone else) really needs good doctors. But medicine is about the care of the whole human. You really can't have healthy people in a sick society. So I'm good with doctors being well-paid, even the best paid. Just so long as they speak out for the welfare of their entire patient base when they are negotiating their terms.

I also think that the consequences of valuing labour more instead of capital, will engender more equality as, regardless of type of job, a decent living will be made — Benkei

But how is it going to come to pass that a society values labour more than capital?

Just now read Habermas' analysis of the formation of the 'bourgeois public sphere' by and during the rise of capitalism. He describes how the "interests of capitalists engaged in manufacture prevailed over those engaged in trade," specifically because the former were directly responsible for the "employment of the country's population."

So you can say that the legitimacy of whatever 'public authority' capitalists wield (inasmuch as they actually do have direct influence on the state), derives from their representing the interests of the working class. And yet the history of capitalism demonstrates time and time again that capitalists without fail will mercilessly sacrifice the health and well-being of their own workers, which they treat as a disposable commodity, unless aggressively regulated. Das Kapital reads like an historical catalog of the abuses of capitalist employers. And nothing has changed. Corporations are the bane of humanity.

I think the sad thing is that we are contentedly cultivating a culture of mediocrity. We just had a $60 lunch, no drinks. It was, meh, at best, if you ignored the fact that coleslaw was inedible. Lenovo refuses to assist with anything software related on their own brand new laptops, even thought it is their bundled software which breaks Windows, and which you can't remove without also breaking Windows. Unless I pay extra for 'software support.' Which I won't do, because I'm certain whoever does that knows absolutely nothing anyway, and I'm better off just fixing it myself (which I did). AI in general doesn't do a great job, it does a mediocre job. AI generated content is obvious. It may get the message across, it doesn't do it well, and it definitely doesn't do it with style. For the most part, the first word that leaps to mind in my day-to-day interactions with Alexa is...frustrating.

So if AI is destined to take over the world, it's only because human beings have become so apathetic that they no longer give a shit that it's doing such a mediocre job. Maybe some of them aren't even aware that things can be anything but mediocre. Ever see the movie "Idiocracy"? That's the future.

Exactly. But they couldn't succeed if the population at large didn't want to be led, right? — frank

Or if the elite weren't using the power of their resources to completely shred value of the information, to the point where most people are so obsessed with misinformation, and conspiracy theories about misinformation, that they simply have no idea what is going on, or what is actually in their own best interest. Per my post on the value and power of public information, which got zero comments.