Comments

  • How Different Are Theism and Atheism as a Starting Point for Philosophy and Ethics?
    Does it mean that Democritus made up a word for atom for something he didn't know what he identified with or intuit about? In that case isn't the word atom vacuous?

    In the case of God, who personified with what object? There must had been an object or existence for personified. Would it be a fair inference?     — Corvus

    For me, "god" is an heuristic that I see no reason to forgo. The natural world provides ample, ample evidence of a huge spectrum of consciousnesses correlative with a spectrum of teleologies. For me to believe that human consciousness is the most complex that exists goes beyond mere hubris, it's just bad reasoning. Democritus' usage of the word atom is borne out by its role in civilization. There are more complex forms of consciousness than ours. Historically, we choose to call these gods. Then we try to yoke them to human purposes; which is where the problems begin.
  • How Different Are Theism and Atheism as a Starting Point for Philosophy and Ethics?
    But do we know what "God" is — Corvus

    Democritus did not know what an atom was, he just identified a general concept he was able to intuit using a word. The word god is fundamentally a personification, meaning it is like us, qua thinking thing. I think this is a pretty traditional philosophical gloss, Absolute Mind, etc. Whatever else that gets tacked onto that is just personal preference (or prejudice).
  • How Different Are Theism and Atheism as a Starting Point for Philosophy and Ethics?
    So, I am asking to what extent does the existence of 'God', or lack of existence have upon philosophical thinking. Inevitably, my question may involve what does the idea of 'God' signify in itself? — Jack Cummins

    I think this is the key question. Whether or not there is a singular being that is god or multiple beings that are gods is relevant insofar as we further assign purposes to such beings. Then the question becomes whether or not human purposes are likely to be relevant to them (i.e. would they even be interested in us). Conversely, if such beings do exist and are in some sense comparable to us (i.e. are typical or paradigmatic of consciousness) then their purposes would be of interest to us, insofar as they might represent a future course of evolution of human consciousness.

    For me, this is the area of potential understanding that atheists forgo. The history of religious dogmatism is a vile thing. But dispensing with the idea of god (the ultimate consciousness) because of the failings of a few fallible humans is throwing out one big baby with some very dirty bathwater.
  • Nietzsche is the Only Important Philosopher
    All of metaphysics is more or less inconsequential because irrespective of the constitution of the universe, as human beings we still need to address the question of how to interact with it — SatmBopd

    Perhaps you simply have not broadened your studies enough? This statement of yours can essentially be interpreted as a form of pragmatism. The Metaphysics of Pragmatism by Sydney Hook (a student and successor of Dewey) is a favourite of mine. All in all, if I had to pick one philosopher to idolize, better Dewey than Nietzsche....
  • Lost in transition – from our minds to an external world…
    The skeptic assumes and asserts that we do not have the means by which we can have knowledge of the external world and, therefore, we can not have knowledge of the external world. Surely there’s something wrong with that argument. — Thales

    Yes. Because "the external world" is at a bare minimum what is not us but matters to us. If the external world does not affect us then it does not matter to us. It can only matter to us to the extent that it does affect us. So even if our knowledge is only of our own affections, these affections are tested on a continuous basis. Such that our knowledge must be assumed really only to exist and advance consistent with external accuracy. That being one aspect of knowledge.
  • Metaphysics of Action: Everybody has a Philosophy
    Which is to say, an individual, will tend to discover and create opportunities to act in accordance with their principles or convictions, to the extent that he succeeds in explicitly formalizing (materializing) his meaning. Which is a philosophy of enaction. — Pantagruel

    This is the direction that I was actually hoping to explore before that unfortunate digression.

    I've since moved from Collingwood to Dilthey's hermeneutics. He believes that the process of en-symbolization (my term for creating symbols), the representation of the universal in the particular, cannot be a function of understanding merely, because it is a creative-imaginative act. Hence my recent comment on how the meaning of an original text overflows and is not captured by its analyses. This is also at the heart of the Davos debates of Heidegger and Cassirer. Dilthey's en-symbolization takes place in the context of the moral world, where an individual action can embody a universal principle (via moral choices). Which is the direction I see a philosophy of enaction taking.


    So what is this saying? The best solution will succeed in conveying its meaning most completely? Or that the meaning that is best able to convey itself is the best solution? Both. We are thinking these thoughts we are now because civilization is what it has been and because matter has evolved in a certain way up to this point.

    But only up to this point, the past. After this point, an event of en-symbolization has occurred (this event of en-symbolization is occurring, i.e. cogito ergo sum). This is true whether matter creates mind or mind creates matter because it is a synthesis anyway. Ideas get encapsulated. There would be no progress of thought if there was no continuity in the life of ideas. In fact, it is this very continuity in the life of ideas which is the device of self-creating agency, civilization. Complex ideas engender complex configurations.

    Ideas exist to convey messages. Ideas are a conduit. Between disparate perspectives.

    Understanding, for Dilthey, is to grasp something's unique individuality, and this is tied to one's own unique moral agency and responsibilities.
  • Paradigm shifts in philosophy
    It's a common misapprehension. Many folk think Gettier "broke" a central idea in philosophy, but as so often, the situation was much more complicated. :wink: — Banno
    :ok:
  • Lost in transition – from our minds to an external world…
    ↪Corvus
    Exactly.
  • Currently Reading
    I was the same. Glad I went for it. — Jamal

    :up:

    Hermeneutics and the Study of History
    Wilhelm Dilthey

    I cannot highly enough recommend Collingwood's Speculum Mentis to anyone interested in the philosophy of the concrete mind. It exemplifies how an original text is not reducible to a synopsis.
  • Lost in transition – from our minds to an external world…
    As it happens I just finished a book that explicitly addresses these questions. The picture it paints conforms in great detail to the one I've been formulating for a few decades. In a nutshell, the concrete basis of our entire concept of objectivity can only arise from the mind's awareness of its own facticity: cogito ergo sum. Consequently:

    the external world , whose origin growth and structure we have been, throughout this book, investigating, is the Mirror of the Mind and the Map of Knowledge in one...In an immediate and direct way, the mind can never know itself it can only know itself through the mediation of an external world, know that what it sees in the external world is its own reflection. (Collingwood, Speculum Mentis)

    For anyone who shares similar intuitions about the nature of reality, I cannot highly enough recommend this short book.
  • Lost in transition – from our minds to an external world…
    ↪Vera Mont
    :up:
  • Lost in transition – from our minds to an external world…
    Before we evolved to the point of being able to perceive and reason, we received sensory input and nourishment from that same physical outside; we responded to it, interacted with it, injected waste products into it, manipulated and altered it. — Vera Mont

    Stating it thus for me identifies the organism-environment system as the basic unit of comprehension and explication.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    What are the dimensions of these phenomenons? Surely you don't mean length and width and depth, which is the typical meaning of dimesnion. — Lionino

    I'm concerned that you frequently fall back on very simplistic definitions. Any experiment takes place in a "phase space" whose "dimensions" correspond to aspects of the thing being studied and controlled. So a dimension is simply an identifiable aspect of a thing. The energy level of an electron shell of an atom of a particular element is one dimension of that thing.

    As to the larger question, I'll again supply a quote: any object considered in abstraction from a mind which knows it is neither material nor mental, but an illusion, a false abstraction. (SM).

    It's incontrovertible, undeniable, that scientific experiment explicitly requires the selective abstraction of a limited subset of the aspects of the reality being studied. It's not debatable, that is how it works, literally. In fact, because reality necessarily overflows this idealized characterization, it is often necessary to employ statistical methods to determine whether results which demonstrate variability (due to the possible influence of unknown factors) fall within defined ranges of accuracy.

    So what is being studied is an amalgam, a synthesis of the mental and the material. Whatever the material might be in complete abstraction from the mental is a matter of pure speculation, since it will never be known in that way. That is all that this is saying. Which is why science ultimately has to accede to philosophy. Science is only one aspect of a more holistic reality, human existence. The study of the nature of which is philosophy.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    I welcome all challenges to my ideas — 180 Proof

    Do you though? "Prove me wrong" is a declaration of fixity of belief. It is entirely up to you to challenge your own beliefs. Ironically you yourself have elected to turn this into an ad hominem about yourself.

    I stated my position clearly and within the framework of the OP. I have no idea what your position is because you don't state a positive position, only a negative one: prove me wrong. Not surprising, given your post history. Almost fourteen thousand posts and not a single discussion to your credit. You're nothing but a troll.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    ↪180 Proof
    I characterized a perspective on the nature of scientific knowledge and its relation to philosophical knowledge, which was the explicit theme of the OP. It's a perspective with which you are very evidently well familiar. I think of all the juvenile memes I've ever seen, "prove me wrong" is probably the most juvenile. I'm not here to challenge your beliefs. Challenge your own beliefs.

    Thanks for letting your true colours shine through so very brightly.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    I.e. the poverty of (e.g. Collingwood's) quasi-Hegelian caricature of both history and science. — 180 Proof

    So it isn't that you didn't understand what was being said (as was implied by your requests for clarification) but that you disagree with it. That's a poor way to conduct a dialog, pretending not to comprehend what you don't agree with. Very menial.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    ↪Vaskane
    Could be. I'm no Nietzsche scholar. His writing always strikes a bombastic chord that distracts me.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    Honestly, I can't make sense of what is written here. We have several polysemic words strung together in three sentences, so there are potentially several meanings in what you said, and I can't tell which one it is that you intended.
    If you recommend me a reading (that is not a whole book chapter), I would be able to understand it better.     — Lionino

    I'm sorry that polysemy is proving such a challenge. Interestingly, Collingwood has something to say about this also:

    To suppose that one word, in whatever context it appears, ought to mean one thing and no more, argues not an exceptionally high standard of logical accuracy but an exceptional ignorance as to the nature of language. (Speculum Mentis)

    I'm not sure what the nature of the confusion is. The phenomena which form the basis of the operations of science exceed the dimensions of scientific study, a fact which is explicitly part of the scientific process, insofar as it advances by controlled experiment.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    but, besides the change, the effect we investigate also has a cause in the outside world. Science investigates that cause too. — Lionino

    More to the point, science investigates that with respect to the chosen dimensions of the change, which was what I was emphasizing. Science is always an abstract and in some sense restricted perspective on what it knows (since it formalizes the abstraction process) to be a more comprehensive reality. So science should always be skeptically self-aware (at which point it becomes history, and finally philosophy, if you follow Collingwood's reasoning).
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    When scientists measure the acceleration of gravity by letting a ball fall, did they cause that effect? — Lionino

    Well, yes, they dropped the ball. Experimentation is fundamentally interactive. Even at the limits of pure observation you have the observer effect.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    ↪Pantagruel Sounds a lot like Adorno's Hegelianism. — Jamal

    Dialectic of Enlightenment is on my list for this year. I would do it next, but volume 4 of Dilthey's collected works has been calling me for some time. It's centres on Schleiermacher's hermeneutics and makes a great contextual background to the Collingwood I'm just finishing.
  • Is Philosophy still Relevant?
    Science is a process of selective limitation.
    — Pantagruel
    Please clarify. Examples would be helpful.     — 180 Proof

    The entirety of Collingwood's book Speculum Mentis deals with the sense in which scientific knowledge is a process of selective abstraction from the reality of concrete facts, whose breadth, depth, and meaning all surpass the limits of scientific knowledge. I couldn't really put it any better than he does:

    The scientist wants actual fact to behave as if it were a mere example of some abstract law; but it is never simply this, and the elements he has deliberately ignored upset all his calculations. He then calls the fact irrational, or contingent, meaning unintelligible to him because too solid and hard to be forced into his moulds, too heavy for his scales, too full of its own concrete logic to listen to his abstractions.
    (Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p. 227)
  • Currently Reading
    ↪Jamal
    Sounds very likely. I didn't find Pym to be at all satirical. Goes to show how much meaning depends on what you bring to what you read.

    I've been on the fence about reading 100 years for a while now but it's obviously a must read. I think it's in the wife's library....
  • Currently Reading
    The Woodlanders
    by Thomas Hardy
  • Currently Reading
    One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
    — Jamal

    Finished. Jamal scores it 11/10.     — Jamal

    Thank you, that is helpful to know. :up:
  • Currently Reading
    The Master Mind of Mars (Barsoom #6)
    Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Metaphysically impossible but logically possible?
    ↪Lionino
    :ok:
  • Metaphysically impossible but logically possible?
    Whether there is a society around me or not, I can reason — Lionino

    Yes. And everything that you might think about will relate to the human existence of being part of a collective. We relate to the universe through the mechanism of our evolution. Those are the only laws that matter. People conducted the business of life long before there was any concept of logic.
  • Is the philosophy of mind dead?
    self-reporting is riddled with bias — Philosophim

    Exactly, which is why I estimate the greatest challenges to knowledge to be those of our own presuppositions. Because at the end of the day, if you cannot be honest with yourself, no other kind of knowledge will be more reliable. Belief precedes understanding.
  • Is the philosophy of mind dead?
    People thinking they can solve philosophy of mind problems from a purely philosophical perspective are deluding themselves. — Philosophim

    Since the immanent experience of mind is both what is being explicated and what is doing the explicating this is a mischaracterization. Perhaps it is in some sense a story, that does not make it un-factual, only historical. Scientific facts likewise exist within an historical context, which can be extensively revised as scientific understanding evolves.
  • Are all living things conscious?
    I would also like to point out that the kind of consciousness being discussed up until now is individual-centric. Whereas in nature we see considerable evidence of consciousness operating at the level of the collective (colony organisms, hive organisms). So it isn't unreasonable to suppose that there is likewise a collective-consciousness of the human species. Evidenced by the fact that even at the level of individual consciousness, prototypical features like reason are essentially social, communicative, dialogical, dialectical in nature. Which again is in aid of my argument for adopting an expansive rather than a reductive view of the nature of consciousness.
  • Metaphysically impossible but logically possible?
    Even acquiescing that logic is a construct, there are laws of logic (and related) without which we cannot productively have discourse. Law of identity, non-contradiction, law of excluded middle, the possibility of analytic judgements, etc. It is perfectly fine that a construct is fundamental. Scientific discourse relies on non-contradiction, as does any discourse. — Lionino

    Yep. There are rules of discourse. The law of non-contradiction doesn't apply to dialectical logic in any non-trivial sense, since dialectics assumes that opposing viewpoints can reach a synthesis. More generally, the "rules" exist in order to facilitate social interactions, which are themselves the bases of the meanings of our existence. So the laws of reasonable discourse are in aid of reasonable social interactions, not the determinants of them.
  • Metaphysically impossible but logically possible?
    I don't see how logic could not be our rational basis; rational discourse is destroyed without logic. — Lionino

    What logic? Symbolic logic? Propositional logic? Dialectical logic? You are speaking of logic as if it were an objective reality, instead of a construct. There are political logics, aesthetic logics, sociological logics. Life is a synthesis of overlapping domains of thought, not one of which is privileged. The essence of dystopian fiction is in the enforcement of a single vision of life, to the exclusion of the rest.

    The notion that you can encapsulate any meaning completely is illusory, and abstraction, perhaps an ideal. Symbolic logic, pushed to its logical limits, is just so much nomenclature. As soon as you attempt to link it to practical realities, its limitations appear.
  • Possible solution to the personal identity problem
    Interesting blend of the materialistic and phenomenal here. The question of personal identity can be asked of the phenomenal conscious itself, whose most interesting feature perhaps is its evolution in time. Since each new thought is not a new consciousness, and yet it is not identical with the previous thought, thought must be the author of its own changes. "A mind which knows its own changes is by that very knowledge lifted above changes." (Collingwood).
  • Is the philosophy of mind dead?
    ↪Wolfgang


    Perhaps the problem originates from the categorical nature of the distinctions you make between what you understand as the subjective and the empirically objective, the physical and the mental. — Joshs

    Yes, this.
    This may help to determine whether the source of the difficulties you raise lies with the philosophical models or with the limits of your imagination. — Joshs

    And this.

    It seems to me that your hypothesis would benefit from a more concise formulation. As I said (and as the quotes from Joshs also highlight) it is possible that the limitations you descry are with the specific approaches themselves, and are not endemic to the question of the philosophy of mind, per se.
  • Currently Reading
    Speculum Mentis
    by R.G. Collingwood
  • Is the philosophy of mind dead?
    ↪Wolfgang
    How does the phenomenology of culture, art, history, ethics, and aesthetics, fit in you analysis? Or does it? It seems that you feel the philosophy of mind must be yoked bi-directionally with-to-by the mechanism of science.

    To me, it appears that you have reduced the problem of the philosophy of mind to a set of failed approaches, and then declared the problem eliminated, rather than recognize the limitations of the approaches. Deacon describes this exact problem rather extensively in his book Incomplete Nature.
  • More on the Meaning of Life
    the meaning of life is to do whatever the fuck you want with yours — Vaskane

    Which as I read it means accepting absolute responsibility for the consequences of your thoughts and deeds, which raises philosophical questions. Raising the additional philosophical question of subjectivity and interpretation.
  • Currently Reading
    ↪Lionino
    I try to read 90 to 120 minutes per day. I'm hoping to increase that a bit, as I just retired. I couldn't say about retention, my personal focus is on integration, to have the information fit into an overall coherent framework. From the Dewey critique I'm currently reading I learned about John Ruskin, who seems to be something of a modern renaissance man and epitomizes the kind of socially conscious and impactful philosophy to which I aspire. Reading should be inspiring. The key, for me, is to make it part of your routine.
  • Are all living things conscious?
    I had rather thought it was the opposite. Crabs and lobsters are sentient beings, but would we call them 'consciously aware'? — Wayfarer

    The question isn't whether we would call them consciously aware, but whether they are. (What is it like to be a bat?) The problem lies in attempting to apply a standard to something that we know exists across a spectrum, from the standpoint of our own existence which operates from a specific portion of that spectrum. Indeed, we can see the spectrum of consciousness evolve in the individual human mind from infancy. In fact, we have all experienced it. If it is possible to be "less conscious" (but still conscious) it is also possible to be "more conscious".

    Per my earlier post, it makes no sense to be restrictive in the definition.
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