I'm contending that there are good reasons not to use the word as it has more recently come to be used (to refer to something non-specific, non-religious, inherently mysterious, and conceptually ill defined), at least, or perhaps especially, in the context of philosophy, as it leads to equivocation. That's it in a nutshell. — Reformed Nihilist

Oh, right. This more particular remark drove me to the philosophers' index where I see there's much more work going on about spirituality than I'd realized.

But I've delved into a few papers and there seems to be a great effort to specify, and to define conceptually. There's a very clear paper by King and Koenig, for instance, which others seem to reference a lot, and which argues for defining spirituality from how people use the word, in relation to belief, practice, awareness and experience.

I don't immediately see that this work is any worse than other philosophy-of-psychology stuff. I read a lot about emotions earlier in the year, for instance, and the same problems seem to apply to the study of them as to spirituality: too many proposed indices, a lack of underlying consensus, arising from the lack of an agreed theoretical framework, but with some good work being done all the same.

The core issue about spirituality is, to me, that there is work being done because it's a hot topic for people, practically speaking in healthcare, and more generally, because more people than before avow that they are spiritual but not (conventionally) religious. This is the opposite of equivocation: people are using the word to clarify their feelings about the world. I recognize a change for example in the availability of funeral ceremonies. 25 years ago when an atheist relative died we faced the option either of a Christian service or of a very priggish humanist who wouldn't allow any sort of prayer, so we opted for the Unitarian, a fine person who conducted exactly the right ceremony. But nowadays in my part of the world there are a lot of 'celebrants' who will conduct all sorts of services.

Perhaps the gap that separates us from belief in superstitions or what you all call magical thinking is the failure to see a mechanism that produces the results. For instance, to me, the placebo effect is simply a name given to this gap. — TheMadFool

The placebo effect is a powerful one that accounts, for instance, for much of the apparent 'effect' of antidepressants, including drugs not intended for depression that are prescribed for depression, if Irving Kirsch and Marcia Angell are to be believed (NrB article from 2011). To me there isn't exactly a gap here: our beliefs influence outcomes, or at least our reports of outcomes (for studies of placebo rely of course on reports). That's the finding, reproduced widely.

There is a gap for some sorts of physicalism, in that 'belief' here seems an irreducible factor. And this is belief on all sides, including the beliefs of professional practitioners, which certainly influence such outcomes.

Socially and indeed even in academe there are many cases in which belief, if shared by sufficient numbers of people, has effects, for the very belief shifts the way we think. An unpopular revolution today that brings cheap bread tomorrow will soon found itself high in the ratings.

Psychology is itself susceptible to problems with its own beliefs. There's some interesting work by a man called Schwitzgebel on over 100 years of surveys of whether we dream in black and white or in colour, which strongly suggests that our beliefs, at least as recorded by mainstream psychological studies, have varied with the rise and fall of black and white movies and television, without psychologists noticing the historical variations. He's refined the paper but here's an early version of it.

So to you, spiritual is synonymous with profound? If so, why not use that term instead of one laden with metaphysical baggage (same question I asked un)?

I feel like I'm getting jumped on for saying "whatever you call spirituality is wrong and bad, because I don't like whatever it is you like", and I'm saying no such thing. — Reformed Nihilist

I for one don't think I'm jumping on anyone :)

I've looked back over the thread and I don't know that there's anything more I can say. I agreed with darth barracuda's early attempt at a summary of what 'spirituality' might mean, and I thought your answer to him, like your answer here about 'profound', sought different substitutes or meanings for the word 'spirituality' because you don't like it and its connotations. I on the other hand like it for its connotations. I use the word because it expresses something I want to express. It implies, for instance, that while an atheist I'm open to talk about religious matters in a way that, I'd suggest, you're not. For a Catholic friend of mine, for instance, attending Mass is a spiritual experience. I think the world would lose subtlety if she was forced to call it 'religious' when that isn't necessarily what she means, just as my feelings about Wordsworthian Romanticism would lose subtlety if I substituted 'profound' for 'spiritual'. If you don't want to use the word, well, fine.

I think the present Dalai Lama has an interesting take on this, including the notion that 'evidence-based logic' is required to explain the notion of the reincarnation of Tulkus or 'scholar-adepts'. This includes supposed memories of past lives, but also predictions before birth, and the testimony of others. Each Dalai Lama prepares the way for the next, as happens in other traditions too.

https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/reincarnation

All that exists after a parent dies is copies of some of their genes. — Andrew4Handel

I've been thinking about how my mother and father both sang to me; who sang to them when they were babies; who sang to them in turn. A genealogy of mothers, stretching back 50000 years, singing. In the sounds we make and the little foibles each of us uniquely has, live the cultures of our forebears, all the way back to when culture began. This emphasis on 'genes', on abstractions supposedly embodied, discards much of what makes us human.

Thanks for the Marxiste, tendance Groucho, views on this :)

One might say: I wasn't feeling myself that day. (Of course Groucho replies: Who were you feeling then?)

I'm interested in how preoccupied we sometimes are by these identity questions. All that logic that puzzles over Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain or Clark Kent / Superman.

And yet before the turn of the 19th-to-20th century it wasn't that uncommon to leave one life, travel over mountains or an ocean, say, and begin again under a new name. Until Bertillon and the fingerprinters and photographers got organized, who was to know who had been who?

The Nazi and eugenicist interpretation of evolution was that we could actively cull the weak and aid evolution. Natural selection is open to this interpretation if it is seen as improving fitness. So for example it is not in our interest to prop up people with poor genes leading to sickness because it could condemn our species as a whole. For instance we advise against interbreeding because it has been shown to cause disabilities. So I don't think that negative applications of evolution are irrational. The idea we should or could transcend evolution is idealistic. It would only be possible to a non determinist who considered human behaviour flexible enough and spandrel like to transcend innate traits. — Andrew4Handel

Evolutionary psychologists are liable to over-emphasise evolution, and people with a scientific cast of mind are inclined to re-work interesting stuff we do into dreary scientific-sounding generalisations.

It seems to me that as soon as we humans have culture, we lay down a good claim to transcend evolution. Whether or not this claim is justified is then an enjoyable intellectual discussion that began with Darwin and will go on and on, because there is no way of arriving at the right answer. I'm an arty-fart so I will have my arty-farty view. On homosexuality, for instance, anti-homosexual culture has until the last few decades blinded much scientific endeavour to how species other than our own own do sexual business. You know, there have always been gay penguins, that's just the way they are, sweetie.

But I would add - culture in the USA faces a bigger threat from the religious/populist movement against the theory of evolution, than it does from the likes of E O Wilson. So we should be sure we see the wood for the trees. I often disagree with Harry Hindu here, for instance, but we should be clear that the likes of him and the likes of me need to stand shoulder to shoulder against anti-intellectualism, and not let careless talk about evolution run away with itself.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Here's what I'm getting out of this: You enjoy art. You enjoy spirituality (whatever that means to you), and you anjoy the work of Daniel Kahneman. You see value in all of these things. If that's what you're saying, then good on you. I just don't see how that's relevant to what I'm saying. — Reformed Nihilist

All I'm telling you is how I weigh different considerations, in what I see as a contrast to how you weigh different things. You're not seeing it as relevant because you weigh things in a different way, which you regard as self-evident (just as I do mine!) and you're puzzled that I wouldn't accord the same weight as you do to different considerations. That's my take on that, anyway. I think you are having the same difficulty with un, because you have a sort of instinctively-scientific manner of speaking. I don't mean I and un have the same views, we are quite different, but in this respect the issues are the same.

The case for personality is easy to make. People have traumatic brain injuries and their personalities change. Which part of the brain is predictive of what sort of personality change will occur. That's something that happens, and makes a pretty strong case for the brain being the sole seat of personality. — Reformed Nihilist

I don't really follow. People have believed this sort of thing for thousands of years: trepanning dates back 8000 years for instance, i.e. surgery on the skull will effect changes in personality desired by the society concerned. Modern blindsight and Anton-Baninski syndrome are (a) still mysteries - why does a person invent such a story? and (b) not clear guides, at least not to me, about anything but the specific problems themselves.

But I see when you move on to identity more clearly what you mean. Here though your argument seems more to be against subjectivity than against spirituality. The transcendental 'I' isn't a spiritual/religious concoction but a philosophical one, surely? Early Wittgenstein frets over it a good deal, for instance, the latest in a long line of German philosophers fretting over it. That's why Metzinger calls his book on out-of-body experience 'the ego tunnel' because his rather odd theoretical solution seeks to solve the ego-problem as he sees it.

Perhaps it would be plainer if I just quoted Wordsworth, as a for-instance, of the sort of spirituality I'm groping to say I embrace::

I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.. — Tintern Abbey

Give me a good argument for emotion over reason and logic — Zoonlogikon

You want to argue for what matters to us as humans. How shall we know what matters to us, what we value, if we strive to eliminate emotion? It's emotion that provokes the very question, what matters?

...there is way more evidence regarding how things like identity, personality and perception work than there was in the past, and some of it accounts for things that were previously accounted for by what was called a soul or spirit. So I don't know if you're saying the evidence is wrong, or that there's something else that takes precedence over the evidence or that there is a different way of looking at the evidence. — Reformed Nihilist

I can't say I share this view. In my 68 years of life there've been tremendous strides in some areas, including biochemistry for instance that's keeping me alive, with stents and angioplasty and beta-blockers; brilliant electronic toys and the Internet without which we wouldn't be having this debate; and so on.

I don't see modern advances in work on 'identity' and 'personality', though. What sort of thing do you mean? Could you be specific? I would tend to cite the arts - painting, sculpture, drama, novels and poetry - as influencing how I feel about identity and personality, which is not exactly 'evidence' in the way you're speaking of it. That's why I lean towards spirituality as having something to say to me, because the aesthetic has something to say to me, and for me to express through it, and the realms of understanding seem to be akin. Daniel Kahneman, for instance, has keen insights into how we think, but there aren't many of him per generation, compared to the insightful creative writers, and he does come to a sort of limit in his puzzlement over why we are the way we are. (But I've been a fiction writer, perhaps that's just my bias, I don't know)

Isn't being completely non-superstitious better than being moderately superstitious (avoiding extremes). The latter is susceptible to a slippery slope...leading to fanaticism. — TheMadFool

'Better than...'

I don't know. I think I have known at least one fanatical person, for example, part of whose fanaticism consisted of being anti-superstition. The fanatic heart can beat in a super-rationalist body. Stalinists were the worst.

And I really don't know anyone, whom I know reasonably well, who does not have rituals of behaviour that would be hard to justify to the super-rationalist. I feel it's better to own up to how we are. Some people check the astrology column even though they 'know' it's rubbish. When I and my oldest friend go walking, it's a rule not to boast of the fine weather till the walk's finished, in case we make it go wrong, even though of course we're sensible chaps and don't 'really' think that.

When I looked back at how my tiny pension fund had been managed over 30 years, at a cost of 1% perannum of its value, by a rationally-minded investment adviser, I realised a fortune-teller and an eye to the prevailing wind would have been cheaper and just as good. The markets are after all sometimes, as Keynes put it, guided by 'animal spirits'.

The early Wittgenstein postulated that the world is the totality of facts, not things. — Question

As you know I'm a Wittgenstein fan but this Tractatus business is just a way of putting it. Are all the facts about the Harry Potter universe part of this totality of facts, for instance?

Later Witt (if TS will allow us to carry on quoting him) suits me better: there are different language-games in which 'fact' works very usefully. But the descriptions even of the same purported fact are likely to be different: does that make the fact different? The Battle of the Boyne happened in 1690, for instance. Either heroic Orangemen expunged dastardly Catholics from the country, or heroic Catholics were cruelly outlawed by despicable Orangemen. I appreciate we feel less strongly about experiments on particles, but there's often a point of view embedded in our descriptions. In Academe, and indeed among friends or families or a society, there's a normative practice which agrees some basis for 'facts', from which chair is Grandad's to who was heroic in 1690.

The full quote reads:

There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best, if they go furthest from the superstition, formerly received; therefore care would be had that (as it fareth in ill purgings) the good be not taken away with the bad; which commonly is done, when the people is the reformer. — Francis Bacon

He was warning against extremism, while arguing that atheism would be better than 'superstition', which in context largely meant Catholic rituals, though witchcraft might also have been in his sights. Let's have Danton but not Robespierre, kind of thing.

One person's superstition is of course another's deeply-held belief. I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have a certain range of habits that they live by, habits that aren't easy to justify to others by reason or evidence. Touch wood, I'm not like that.

Having said that, using terminology like "spirutuality" has connotations, and historically those connotations include a "something else" that is not just different than the body, but different from everything we know, and the reason we even seem to have this conception is that we never used to know just how much the brain/body did in terms of our perceptions and sense of self. Have a look at some of the links in my earlier discussion in this thread, if you haven't. It is very compelling stuff regarding the brain being the source of stuff that used to cause philosophers of the mind all kinds of problems. — Reformed Nihilist

Here I don't agree with your argument, 'the reason we even seem to have this conception...' You're placing yourself in the Dennett/Dawkins argument here, that you the scientific sympathiser somehow know better about the origins of spiritual feelings - or 'conceptions' - than people who believe in the spiritual; and that spiritual knowing is in some way in competition with scientific knowing, so then as scientific knowing becomes supposedly more 'successful', so spiritual knowing should accept its comparative failure.

I just don't accept this at all. I don't claim, for a start, to have an understanding about how we have the conception of the spiritual, and I don't know how you justify your claim. And I don't think spirituality is some sort of competitor with neuroscience. If you take Kant, for instance, or at least one modern strand of views about Kant and religion, we can have knowledge, opinion and faith: the first two on the kantian model are empirical; the third is not, but is the sort of thing where we can make justified assertions. You can wholeheartedly commit to science as a naturalistic method, that is, and at the same time have justified religious or spiritual beliefs. In the terms of a former poster here, Landru, these are different discourses, where different rules apply.

That's all I'm stuck with, as my outlook. Science for me has much narrower limits than it does for you; I follow it pretty closely and am much more sceptical than you about how much it understands of what we do and perceive. And for me, while I'm an atheist with a strong interest in contemporary science, I feel there are other ways of talking about ourselves and the world we're in - aesthetic, ethical and spiritual - which aren't beholden to the scientific way of talking, and carry equal weight with me.

Once again, I don't have a world-view. Nihilism is the absence of a world-view. I really did think this might be the one forum where I didn't have to explain this. If you adopt a world-view you cannot end up a nihilist. If you don't you can only end up a nihilist. Maybe it's because you are used to people using the term as some kind of badge of honour. — daldai

For me, on the contrary: your claim is that nihilism is comprehensive and admits of no exceptions. It's an all-encompassing attitude to things. That to me is a world-view. I think you're splitting hairs to claim otherwise for the sake of a good chat.

NO. God, please, stay away from ukulele playing, at all costs. — Bitter Crank

If logic is based from something illogical, what value makes this logical? — Advocate

Logic is a multiplicity of systems built from the way we find ourselves making inferences. It's logical because a community of logicians and other thinkers think it so, and their ways of saying it makes sense in turn make sense to many others.

So I am a brain, my brain (or my body), I can understand that but in this case, why am I that brain in particular ? — Julian

I is indexical, that is, whatever you turned out to be, you found yourself among fellow-animals who say 'I' when they mean, well, 'I'. The other possibilities are other I's, imaginary or in other lives. History and genealogy are where the whys reside, and they lead only here, scattering away other possibilities as they come. Poetry is a better guide than science to such a question.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. — T S Eliot

You are missing the I-you sense of how we are. There's philosophy about it but it's quite Continental and might not appeal to your scientific world-view. Like martin Buber, who has a core sense of the I and Thou, but can wander off into a rather vague mysticism. Or Emmanuel Levinas, whose approach is that individualism is a misapprehension: we are by nature cooperators, social animals, I and you not I and it or I and he/she.

As a process I agree with Rich: try more than one form of the arts, and try things that involve working with other people: choral singing, ukelele playing, watercolour classes, writing workshops, whatever you fancy. The arts are as glorious an achievement as the sciences. Watch other people and listen to them and wonder about them. Mind-reading is a marvellous skill, for instance, which you only learn by interacting with other people openly and learning how to read them as they read you. Asking questions and not being in too much of a hurry to come in with your own answers works too.

You responses seem to be based on a pre-defined characterization of what you think an "angry atheist" or "evangelical atheist" looks like, and you seem to be offering critiques of that characterization. I am an empathetic, creative, caring person, who is interested in the truth. — Reformed Nihilist

I'm sorry any reply is short, I am busy for a few days. It is hard to know one another just through forums like this, and one takes shortcuts based on stereotypes. So, pardon me for doing this with you :)

What we judge of each other also comes up in your remarks about the right naming of gendery topics. I live near the lesbian capital of northern England and there's quite a variety of labels in use there, including women ironically referring to each other as the husband and the wife. I just avoid any controversy. An odd thing that happens with campaigning people is that they tend to over- generalise from their point of view. Dammit, they know what it is to Purple, they've been on a journey to be Purple, so what right has a straight like you to call Purples whatever you want?

I suppose that's what I also think happens to atheists. You must be a Dawkins/Dennett of some kind, sort of thing.

I think we can say without any scientific controversy that personality, emotions, identity (and it's locality inside or outside your body) and everything else we would identify as "cognative" are a result of brain processes. Is it theoretically possible that there is a "something else" involved? Sure, there's nothing that makes that logically incoherent. There's also no good reason to assume that there is such a thing. Or at least none that I'm aware of. — Reformed Nihilist

This seems to be an area worth exploring. I would tend to say 'bodily' rather than 'brain', I would worry about 'result', - but I would also say that this whole section is a 'scientific' way of speaking that slips into assuming it can represent other ways of speaking, that it can speak for us all in all contexts.

It's still much more useful, for example, to talk about 'personality, emotions and identity' in terms that aren't *reducible* to brain processes. So to argue that they are 'the result' of brain processes troubles the Humean in me: how has this been demonstrated? The models are primitive. 130 years since William James and the present-day psychological work on emotions, for instance, is amazingly primitive and lacking a secure philosophical basis, or so it seemed to me earlier this year when I was reading up about emotion.

Sorry I didn't get to spirituality and I'm out of time for now.

Sing

Everyone I know, or at least anyone that is taken the least bit seriously in the world, that argues against spiritualism, publicly and repeatedly acknowledges that people have experiences which they believe to be spiritual, and that are very emotionally moving. Of course people do. Everybody knows that. It doesn't change the fact that to many of us, we believe that those experiences that people have can actually be best described in terms of material causes. — Reformed Nihilist

Well, then you need to continue your dialogue with Mariner, for it's not clear to me that it's any *better* to describe how I feel when listening to Shostakovich or feeling a sense of oneness with the universe 'in terms of material causes'. I talk about artistic feelings in artistic terms usually, political matters in political terms, and and spiritual matters in sometimes spiritual terms and language. What your claim to 'best description' seems to involve is a rejection of the very possibility of 'spiritual terms and language', i.e. I am welcome speak on your terms, about science and stuff, but you won't speak on my terms, because you claim your terms encompass my terms. Pomos would talk about 'discourse' here and I think that's a useful term.

For myself, I can imagine there might be some sort of sociology-biology-chemistry-physics chain of explanations that could in an imaginary future universe show me the 'material causes' of my saying, say, 'I believe there are more things in heaven and hearth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' But it's a long way off, and involves a leap of faith in the scientific enterprise. It isn't here now, revealed in the fmri scans of 23 Columbia Uni students to be the basis of thought.

I disagree about emotions, incidentally, and I think that's a contributory factor here: I take emotions more seriously, as cognitive factors, than I think you do. Emotions are, under one sort of description, judgments about the world, and it's useful to talk of them in that way as well as in terms of hormones and a brain. When you argue for 'material causes' you seem to me to make a commitment to the rightness of a certain kind of scientising enterprise, and that commitment is as emotionally-based as any reasoned 'spiritual' commitment.

But it seems to me that, for instance, the post-Gettier attempts to analyse knowledge as belief + truth + (internal) justification + 'some complicated missing element' is some sort of a degenerative research programme in contemporary epistemology — Pierre-Normand

I agree. Against this, I like Williamson's notion of 'knowledge first' - knowledge as foundational and in a separate zone from belief. But I've read Williamson, and even been to a little seminar run by him, and he's the nicest bloke - but every tiny possibility has to be explored by him too, footnote after footnote, and then there's the argument by Sproggins (2014) although Hackface (2015) would disagree...all that! I am a bit of a nit-picker by nature, I think that's why I enjoy the analytic approach mostly, but sometimes you've just got to see the bigger picture or you'll get awfully lost.

If only our teeth were as good as in bygone days :)

I tend to regard W's silence ('that of which we cannot speak...') as apophatic - being circumspect in the face of a mystery, rather than (with positivism) declaring metaphysics simply meaningless — Wayfarer

I completely agree. You know when he was in Vienna in 1926 or so Feigl tried to introduce Witt to the rest of the Vienna school, thinking they'd get along famously - but they didn't and Feigl for one rapidly understood that Witt's thinking (which was anyway already shifting by then) was a long way out of kilter with the positivists. (Sorry if I've told you this story already!)

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that a premise is emotional. I suspect that this is a false dichotomy between reason and emotion. Reason is a thing we do. Emotion is a way we are. — Reformed Nihilist

Well, the dichotomy is in the language and is present in much philosophising, including yours. I believe we are constantly both reasoning and emoting and that yours is as false a dichotomy, between being and doing, as whatever you thought mine was. Certainly analytic philosophy, for instance, largely avoids the use of emotive terms, and has only in the last 20 years or so come to treat emotion seriously, e.g. through the late peter Goldie.

The general feeling I have is that many critiques of 'spirituality', including yours, fail to account for spiritual feelings and emotions. What is it that the religious are feeling when they describe profound emotions? The Dawkins/Dennett approach is largely to ignore that aspect of things, and to treat religions as if they were pseudo-sciences, with all the emotion distilled into propositions. I should like to begin with mutual respect, between atheist and believer, and such mutual respect seems to me to involve accepting that 'spiritual experience' happens, feels profound to the person it happens to, combines deep thought with deep feeling, and as such has considerable standing in one's evaluation of how things are, how the world is. Even if you're an atheist like me!

...when Wittgenstein risked his life in battle day after day, he found solace in Tolstoy’s version of the Gospels: hence his prayer ‘May God enlighten me’. — Wayfarer

Thanks for this very interesting quote, Wayfarer. It isn't how his biographer Monk (sic) reads his view of religion. But certainly Wittgenstein was profoundly changed by his experiences in the trenches, which divided him from a Russellian view, and part of that was a greatly-enhanced sympathy for the religious point of view, thanks to Tolstoy. Certainly later on he avowed on many occasions that he couldn't find Christian belief in him, although he had great sympathy with it. Anyway, the general point stands: Wittgenstein's quote about not speaking about certain matters wasn't out of Russellian disbelief, but out of a view that a different kind of discourse was required to the approach he took to philosophy.

feeling of belonging in the world or serving a higher purpose — darthbarracuda

I felt your answer, db, was very powerful. It's worth noticing that you found it right to say 'feeling' several times, and 'desire'. I'm an atheist who just accepts the notion of spiritual feelings and spiritual thoughts, although I suspect that to separate 'feelings' and 'thoughts' is inappropriate.

The parallel for me is with art that profoundly moves me. In another thread NobleDust speaks of this as 'divine', and while I don't use that language I feel we're on common ground. To respond, say, to Shostakovich's later symphonies or certain poems or Guernica or the dark musical 'Carousel' - all obviously personal examples - is to experience a marvellous mixture of the aesthetic, the rational and the emotional.

The critique of spirituality rarely touches on 'feelings' or 'emotions'. For me this realm of emotions underlies everything, even rationality: a rational argument is only as good as its premisses, which are at bottom emotional. Mood is the way we are in the world.

I think one needs to be wary of quoting Wittgenstein as if he might agree with an anti-spiritual stance. He was very interested in religion although a non-believer. He wrote of ethics as 'Supernatural', and he didn't mean by this to write it off, but rather to say that as with aesthetics, which he bracketed with ethics, something other than 'natural' criteria apply.

Over here in the UK the Greens and green issues got swamped in the last election. It felt like a revival of late 20th century politics, with added Brexit. Who even acknowledged the environment had problems?

I'm wary of generalisations about 'the media', though. Mainstream press here missed the minor leftist revival, which happened on 'social media' and in the streets. The Guardian for instance is in trouble, partly because it seems to be misreading some of its core readership. I for one have gone over to the Independent.

Like BC I'm a leftist who's not very interested in identity politics. That may just show our age. But politics is partly about alliances and I'm game to make space for identity claims that hold up if they in turn are game to ally with my kind who want renewable energy and greater income redistribution.

Different people can have different experiences of the same thing. That doesn't make it a different thing. Some people hate cilantro, some people like it, but it's still cilantro. — Reformed Nihilist

Just a joke on the side. When my (American) wife came to England she couldn't find cilantro in the shops. She asked me, why don't you guys have cilantro? As it happens, we do, but we call it coriander. And it's 'the same thing' :)

people think stuff out here "dodgy," but just look at what's here: meaning, information, patterns, mathematical objects, transitions, tendencies, dispositions, institutions, -- I could go on and on and on — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know if you know the paper where David Chalmers argues for a contemporary Fregeanism where 'sense' pretty much becomes 'intension'. Here it is.

But why go through the type business at all? Why not just say, as Frege does, that we each have the belief that such-and-such? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not a Gricean, but I@m trying to follow the logic of Grice's thought. He goes through the type business because he's trying to find good generalisations. Partly he's trying to solve one problem of Fregean 'sense', which is that it hovers in no-man's-land, an inbetweenie:

The reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by its means; the idea, which we have in that case, is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense, which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself. — Frege

So I think this shows Frege not merely saying that each of us does something unique, but rather saying there's something intermediate: that 'sense' is something some but not all of us will share. Grice's version of that is 'implicature'. Both of them, 'sense' and 'implicature', seem to me interesting but dodgy concepts: they are the work of analytical people trying to pin down something slippery, contextual and often feeling-based or feeling-related. What do you think is the right way to look at it?

I have loads to say about that one suggestive little change to Frege's account, but I'm curious to see what other people think first. — Srap Tasmaner

I haven't quite grasped the distinction yet. Grice speaks of 'the belief-types' and 'the beliefs of particular peoples'. Isn't that use of 'the' the equivalent in his nomenclature to Frege's 'the sense'?

The world we inhabit is the world of our experience. — Brian

Our experience includes our *imaginative* experience. I can imagine the infinite and infinitesimal, worlds in ten or eleven dimension, a divinity made flesh then resurrected after death (I don't personally believe in that but I accept that many others imagine it so), artificial worlds of numbers, every fiction ever written, the scientific image.

I believe that I can, in these imaginings, imagine the point of view of all sorts of other points than the ones inside me, indeed I imagine inhabiting them.

"Laws of nature" is a metaphor. — Mariner

I quite agree. And even today, well...there are for instance laws in many countries against the use of marijuana. Laws are not inviolable rules.

Incidentally, your grasp of the intricacies of royalty is impressive :)

I am most concerned about the problem of the storage of nuclear waste. After 60 years of nuclear energy production, most of the waste from this production is still in short-term facilities because nobody can resolve scientifically and politically what to do with it. Some of this waste, 'high-level' as it's called, will remain dangerous for many hundreds, indeed thousands of years. There is continuing political pressure to develop longer-term storage facilities in areas already committed to nuclear power, e.g. those dependent economically on the production of nuclear power. But unfortunately many of these areas are geologically unsuitable for long-term storage deep below ground.

Here's a link to a pro-nuclear association's web page about waste disposal: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/storage-and-disposal-of-radioactive-wastes.aspx

There are many advanced discussions, well-developed proposals and interesting schemes outlined on this page, and therefore many fine-sounding phrases, but very little action. I'm interested to know how you think this problem is going to be resolved. At the moment the nuclear industry's policy seems to be that technical solutions will turn up which will become politically acceptable: I don't understand the basis for either the technical or the political claim.

...we and everything we made will in some way be eternal — gunner

One thing I find confusing about the analytic approach, which people have explained to me in different ways without my understanding so far, is - are facts tenseless? If so, as many claim, then the facts of our existence are, as it were, eternal, just as you allege, not placed in time somehwere. I carp about this because I think of everything as historically situated, even supposed facts.

I don't think we can dodge the fact that Nietszche was a misogynist. But of course any single quotation wrenched out of context can give a false impression, and this particular sentence, clearly not meant literally, doth not a patriarch make.

The idea here is to condense your experience of religious discussions in very short aphorisms, intended to summarize some recurrent traits of these discussions. — Mariner

Atheists tend to neglect the nature of religious feeling.

Believers tend to exaggerate the importance of rational-sounding arguments.