In The Open Universe Karl Popper has some interesting arguments about the theoretical limitations of omniscience within known physical constraints. Worth a read.

Philosophical "truths" are inevitably derived through processes of reasoning that traverse the boundaries of induction and deduction. So they are not amenable of proof as in mathematics, or verification, as in science. Rather, they evolve through consensus. However, since cumulative experiences (knowledge) are invariably variable, my understanding of the inherent truth of the allegory of the cave, for example may be different than yours, and Plato's. Some philosophers argue that an author's intentions establish the definitive content of his claims. Some believe that writings only achieve their fullest elaboration through their readership.

For me, the one constant seems to be that everyone now agrees that there is an interface between mind and matter. There is just a lot of disagreement over which side has priority, and where exactly that interface occurs.....

Madness & Civilization by Michel Foucault
A fitting start to 2022?

My 2021 readings, in chronological order:

• First Principles by Herbert Spencer
• Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
• Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim
• The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia by John Carey
• Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow
• The Antiquary by Walter Scott
• An Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood
• The Metaphysics of Pragmatism by Sidney Hook
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger
• Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Constitution of the Human Being by Max Scheler
• On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings by Max Scheler
• The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
• Selected Philosophical Essays by Max Scheler
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
• Reform or Revolution & Other Writings (Books on History, Political & Social Science) by Rosa Luxemburg
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
• On Individuality and Social Forms by Georg Simmel
• Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
• The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope
• The Epic of Gilgamesh by Unknown
• Descriptive Psychology by Franz Brentano
• The Idea of Nature by R.G. Collingwood
• The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
• Adventures of Ideas by Alfred North Whitehead
• Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
• The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers
• Naming and Necessity by Saul A. Kripke
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
• Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth: An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology by Andrew Gluck
• The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto R. Maturana
• The Psychology of Intelligence by Jean Piaget
• De Anima (On the Soul) by Aristotle
• Philosophy of Existence by Karl Jaspers
• Story of Psychology, The by Morton Hunt
• The Origin and Goal of History by Karl Jaspers
• Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse

I always like to think of false beliefs as being dissonant with reality, — Tzeentch

But are we talking about scientific truths? Or moral truths? What about aesthetic truths? Moral and aesthetic truths can appear to contradict natural or scientific truths (it is better to give than to receive). And maybe some kinds of suffering are better than some kinds of satisfaction (it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied...).

It isn't so much that science is to blame for today's woes as that people try to use science in lieu of traditional normative institutions; for which it is, unfortunately, a poor substitute.

Foundations Of Cognitive Science
by Michael I. Posner (Editor)

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
by Herbert Marcuse

I have one high-CBD strain that seems to facilitate hyper-focus, great for reading and writing. I find I read a little slower, but I really squeeze every last drop of meaning out of every sentence; often I'll anticipate upcoming developments in the text. My days of doing psychedelics are behind me; those were more about personal psychological epiphanies for me.

I also have the music going constantly. Renaissance classical or instrumental jazz. Good for neural development.....

Yes, I was hypothesizing about the transfer of some essential spiritual thing into a bio-mechanical context and wondering at what point the translation of something ideal "an essence that is the complex me" breaks down into how that essence can be expressed physically. More or less.

But the hypothesis is that you are transferred. So what is transferred then?

"What is it to be Enlightened?"

To know that the best way to keep a secret is by telling everyone.

I wonder if my consciousness were transferred to another body (brain) whether my signature would stay the same, or be slightly different because of different learned neuromuscular habits (i.e. I would essentially be forging my own signature)?

As far as I see, Huxley fits squarely in the tradition of spiritual realism, by which I mean that the spirit is real. As I mentioned, this is in general typical of eastern cultures, as opposed to the scientific materialist orientation of the west. It is one of Weber's primary theses.

To what extent is consciousness based on the physical basis of human experiences? — Jack Cummins

I think it is necessary to recognize at the outset that identifying the mind and the brain is a uniquely western problem. Eastern cultures have a tradition of fundamental spiritualization (Weber, Jaspers, etc.) compared to Western that, to a certain extent, transcends the mind-brain problem.

No doubt the brain is capable of engendering behaviours in response to stimuli. But if you adopt the spiritual perspective, these behaviours themselves could be thought of as subject to direction. A theory of will could be constructed along these lines.

If you become aware of a bias you have begun to mitigate it. So even if bias can't be eliminated, this does not mean we should not attempt to minimize it.

https://effectiviology.com/cognitive-debiasing-how-to-debias/

According to Joseph Sirgy, people in general function through a combination of the desire to achieve self-consistency, self-esteem, and self-knowledge. These motives can conflict.

The Origin and Goal of History
by Karl Jaspers

Philosophy of Existence
by Karl Jaspers

Lots of things happen can happen in nature that are disruptive of their surrounding systems. These things either disappear, or completely disrupt existing systems resulting in new ones. The question is, should we be disrupting our biosphere or harmonizing with it?

I highly doubt that if you take even the most prestigious physicist today and sent him back in time, would be able to make such contributions as Aristotle or Descartes or Hume. — Manuel

Interesting. And this is the kind of thing that makes me think that cultural contents (what is understood) are as important as the thought process itself.....

Do you have free will regarding your thoughts? Well, first notice that your thoughts occur linearly through time in succession — Paul Michael

This would be your first mistaken assumption. People do not think purely sequentially. Trivially, the Zeigarnik effect shows this, where the mind tends to continue to work on unsolved or unresolved problems until it reaches a solution, when you suddenly remember the name of an actor that escaped you in conversation yesterday, for example. Eureka.

De Anima
by Aristotle

:up:

I feel uncomfortable having to make a choice between "what is understood" and "the way in which it is understood" because they go hand in hand in all branches of knowledge but if I were forced to pick one, I'd go with "the way in which it is understood". — TheMadFool

Do you think that there could be such a thing as "transformative knowledge?" They talk about the "Copernican Revolution" which marks the paradigm shift to a heliocentric understanding. To me, that seems like an example where expertise, as you call it, begins to alter the basic nature of our understanding, via the relationship between the individual thinker and the universe.

How could that be a difference? — Heiko

Well, in some sense objective contents are "digested" and assimilated/accommodated to contribute to the subjective makeup, so both things occur. I guess I'm really trying to wrap my head around whether having a comparatively limited foundation of objective understanding would necessarily limit the subjective experience in other important ways? I'm reading De Anima next, which I suppose will help answer that.

You used a pretty great example, the distinction between using science and inventing science. I am just digesting that...

. He is modelling how to use language during the work of inquiry. — Paine

Like a kind of generalized methodology,. I agree with the idea that knowledge is meant to be enacted. It fits with my focus on genuine beliefs (which intend towards something with true investment) vs. merely hypothetical beliefs, which appeal to logical possibility.

I don't really think so. I don't think that the average person living today understands how the world works better than Aristotle. — T Clark

So then you would place a much higher value on the subjective aspect of experience, relative to the meaning of the objective aspect? A Shakespeare play cast in a modern setting has the same meaning, plus that meaning transcends those settings and is more important than them?

Sure, we know more stuff now than they did back then, but we aren't smarter or wiser. Today we use science — T Clark

Ok, granted. Much of what it means to be human is to interact with the humans around you. In fact, I argue that all of it does. If you are Paul Dirac, you still measure your life by the daily interactions with friends and family, traditional activities, etc. Or you live in a very lonely reality.

But still, that actually increased grasp of something must mean something at the social level too. Material knowledge must be quantifiable in some subjectively meaningful sense.

When I was studying artificial neural networks in the 90s it seemed evident to me that the way that the so-called "hidden layers" worked pointed to a correlation of properties between entities or phenomena that, to the human mind, were unavailable. ie. the classic "mine-rock discriminator" detects an otherwise unobservable "dimension" in which mines and rocks are uniquely differentiated.

Basically, any set of features or characteristics that can be used to identify and discriminate constitutes a dimension.

The Story of Psychology
by Morton Hunt

Well, logic is a function of human reason. Aspects of quantum theory are definitely counter-intuitive, you could interpret them as being also illogical, in the same sense.

Meaning you can't disprove one metaphysical position with another one.

Of course, the scientific method itself is fundamentally a methodology which doesn't necessarily have metaphysical implications. ie. Science openly admits its status as provisional and approximate. Science is consistent with material reductionism, but it doesn't imply it......

The universe doesn't give a damn if it follows our logic or not. — Manuel

:up:

The Psychology of Intelligence
by Jean Piaget

Is racism natural? — Lil

Is being an asshole natural? Or is having the disposition to be an asshole natural?

I think almost everything is learned behaviour.

I tend to agree with Aristotle's approach (Metaphysics, Book One):

the wise man is he who can comprehend difficult things, such as are not easy for human comprehension (for sense-perception, being common to all, is easy, and has nothing to do with Wisdom)

It opens the door for me to the idea of "cognitive effort" or will, which has both empirical and normative aspects.

I wouldn't agree on that, my personal view is that:
1. Conscious mind is a biological phenomena
2. Animals are less conscious but never completely unaware — SpaceDweller

:up:

Cognitive biases are a well-established fact. The vast majority of people reason fallaciously in a wide variety of circumstances.

Intuition has formed the basis of my professional career in troubleshooting computer systems. For a self-trained engineer, I have enjoyed considerable success. I feel it has guided my studies equally well. I've heard it described as "immerse yourself in your subject matter....and wait." I'd say that's accurate.

Yes, ,much of everyday human reasoning is fraught with technical difficulties (viz. cognitive biases). So there is some faculty which counterbalances sensory reasoning. I personally have always enjoyed a highly-developed intuitive sense. It's no mystery to me that there is such a thing.