Are "choco Leibniz", teleological biscuits?

Ariel, the older you get, the more chances you will have to try it out!

Be open to serendipity in thoughts occurring.

Don't replace analogies or metaphors with allegories!

Uncanni, thank you for the wonderful Hillel quote which has been my own viewpoint for a long time now. (Everyone else - I'll bring details to screen - am visiting screens at moment.)

The Mad Fool,
1 - I am sure all theories contain subtleties which however are not beyond our faculties to contemplate as we help each other along. The other thing is, "falsification" and "revolutions" in the rather weak sense might not happen for several generations. It looks silly for some people to crow that they have "ruled out" something that was the all-the-rage hypothesis a few years ago, when in 200 years time they will have arrived at a far more compendious halfway house. (I except the so called "many worlds" which in fact didn't make sense, all along, so I am not really excepting it - a thread of its own.)
2 - I haven't been reading Anselm, this was alluded to in passing by Knowles, 'The evolution of medieval thought'. But I don't think Anselm made a mistake - although some of his contemporaries perhaps gave it a little stronger meaning - and perhaps not much stronger (again my feeling from secondary sources). I think it is very important for us moderns to realise when we don't need to be quite so categorically categorical. I think of reality as one of those old ships that flexes and creaks - and sails. Not as a Titanic that cracks up (without us noticing). Principles are there for the apply-ing. Perhaps "necessarius" means "the rule" and a word for contingent would mean something like occasional and quasi-random. The two are of course on a continuum and might even sometimes coincide, in my opinion. I think it is vital to remember that there are two kinds of probability - both occurrences, and our knowledge of them. I think of reality as being on the non-approximate side of approximation.
3 - An interesting thing about Gödel indeed is that what he describes as "proof" can reputedly sometimes occur without help from an outside system, however it rather often does require input from outside. I really adore ifs and I really adore buts - I think they are so firm and reliable.

Additionally, and not in any way diminishing the foregoing, there is the poignancy of change. At ten one often dreams of independence but familiarity with the familiar has not prevented an attachment combined with a fair-minded objectivity. At the same age I was sad that the sun is going to fade in 1 million years (or whatever the figure was). Obviously I knew that wasn't what would finish off my parents, or me. The felt void surrounded that it would finish off someone else, and the animals.

Surely Euclid's theorems were provisionally held to be as good as proven until we realised they are a special case of something bigger. Likewise Newton's vis-à-vis the quantum/relativity.

Basically, what we thought we "knew" turns out to be just part of a spectrum or continuum. Spectrums are not thin lines but more like a solid cheese with textures. Nuancing science is what mostly happens, rather than "revolutions" or even "falsifying" (unless the proposition had been very narrow).

So, knowing and believing are not as dodgy as we might fear, provided we are respectful of their complexity.

I think the subtlety and slight but not excessive looseness in all this is refreshingly hard-nosed. I've always intuited this, I think the family and my teachers always accepted something like this.

It's tragic how often the "great" and the "good" deny that the middle needn't be excluded when it doesn't contradict the law of non-contradiction.

I read in Knowles that Anselm (and I type from memory) translated "necessarius" as "admissible" and not "compelling". (However he spoiled everything by attempting a so-called "ontological proof" which I am told Descartes swallowed.)

Surely there must be a version of what people in their heart of hearts want from "empiricism" or "positivism" that acknowledges and benefits from the value of multi-layered reality.

Seeing that hygiene is about a place for everything and everything in its place - good boundaries - which becomes visually harmonious.

My only brush with Maritain was on a forum where it was pointed out he trenchantly criticised some serious manifestations of bad church organisation that had had huge bad effects. You have reminded me I must go out of my way to get hold of him. Everyone that will pass as agnostic, I want to know better.

I'm one of those "terrors" heavily dependent on secondary sources - so far! Kant is growing on me.

It seemed like spring, then.

I didn't know autumn mellow - mentally (I always loved it physically).

I increasingly do as you describe, and at the same time I think about my cheese sandwich, my pot of tea, my wonderful home, my fabulous shelves of books, etc.

Big pictures and small pictures at the same time, with a modicum of lateral thinking thrown in, will learn to harmonise after almost a lifetime!

I often read the last chapter first and then the chapters in reverse order. This helps me form a mental scheme of logical relations. I speed read nowadays, that is easier than struggling. I increasingly take notes during this process. Then I go back to favourite bits in more detail. Some books have been presented without much reason to their serial format. The more I dip into science, philosophy, history, you name it, the more I can "place" what I am reading.

I've not read Adler. What is above looks good as stated - bearing in mind in most cases I am doing most of this at the mental level only. D A Carson contrasts the 1972 edition of Adler unfavourably with the first edition.

The other thing I meant to mention is, sometimes a religious leader will wield the falsafa trope - claim that when adherents or observers wish to apply logic and honesty, that is necessarily sophistry even when it isn't.

Anyway best wishes.

Your supposed refutations don't hold water but more importantly this is a Prussian and Hegelian question. Your Qabbala sources are drawing on whatever antecedents Hegel also had. As Nietzsche warned, this attitude is bringing on nihilism.

You can state what you are stating, but it isn't a discussion.

I said, " Some Hindus, most Marxist-Leninists (as in Cambodia) behave like the OP describes, are they "Abrahamic"? The agnostic atheists like GMBA, are they "Abrahamic"? "

The reason I said that is, you are stating it is because of Abraham - ism that suffering such as these people are causing, to people of the same religion as themselves (in the first case), or receiving from somewhere, anywhere (the second case), is being caused.

This is not a discussion point in your point of view so there is nothing for me to participate in.

You have copied woodenly something you saw stated somewhere and aren't paraphrasing it intelligibly or making a case, nor are you advocating we nuance it in regard to the extent to which "Abraham - ism" is a red herring, or Qabbala is a red herring (even if not 100% so).

Discussions when they really occur, are full of nuance, paraphrase, tact.

You say I am the first person ever to testify to what I testified to and you knew well I am not. If I speak for who I speak for, every reader except you knows this holds water.

There is no discussion for me to participate in.

But they do "choose" their gender in the parlance of officialdom, from the falsely slimmed down menu foisted on them. The stated alternative of "gender minority" was "cisgender".

I've always had hobbies, studies and jobs where men & women joined in equally. My cousin when a boy liked girly dolls for some years, afterwards married a lady, they had a happy marriage.

People didn't pass personal remarks about each other, didn't look in the mirror much and the women didn't use much makeup (the makeup sellers starved).

Now if it is sometimes argued gender is different from sex, this leaves additional question marks as to categories.

Above all I want to comment that, saying that an even higher proportion of these people are quivering wrecks, than everyone else, merely illustrates what a high proportion of the rest of us are having our nerves shredded as well. I for example am now scared rigid because politics and commerce tell me every day that I haven't got a mind. Some days I "keep myself sane" some days it "gets to me".

This is the trend from ideologically motivated corps whether in schools or anywhere. The immediate context can get salami sliced between "gender", economic vulnerability, race relations, cultural deprivation, you name it.

There is even an ideology that you have to finnick about everybody else's personal appearance.

So, this study doesn't grind anybody's axes but neither does it by any means disprove concerns.

An emotionally frail young person goes to see officialdom, officialdom tells them they don't worry enough and ought to worry more, et voila.

Some Hindus, most Marxist-Leninists (as in Cambodia) behave like the OP describes, are they "Abrahamic"? The agnostic atheists like GMBA, are they "Abrahamic"?

Some of us do sometimes do some of what is described, but the argument would have greater force if weakened.

In addition as GMBA points out, emotion sometimes doesn't accompany sin, sometimes precedes it, sometimes follows it.

There are no grounds for saying people should not associate their suffering to its cause (that may be instructional - e.g telling the relatives not to go to Cambodia). This is slyly glossed over with the throwaway word "instead".

The OP is merely telling us it's our fault we are sad. I think I've made it clear what I think of that.

I don't care how mixed up a character Father Abraham was, I insist on thinking straight and I insist on thinking a lot!

Infinity is several numbers, and several concepts, and a lot of additional things besides - read Kaplan.

Eiwar, my own gut feeling is that there probably aren't any metaphysical questions that are solely verbal. Verbal questions are fun with words (another of my favourite hobbies). The marvellous gift of language has infinite layers of connotations, etymology, sense, usages, the contingent idiosyncracies in specific languages, etc.

I don't agree with the two camps you mention being the complete survey of these questions. When the public, who ought to be educated in thinking, can no longer do so, these questions are no longer trivial or obvious. When professionals tell me I haven't got a mind, I know matters have gone too far down the drain.

Brouwer and Black, like Peirce, are hot on when the law of the excluded middle doesn't need applying because it doesn't violate the law of non-contradiction.

Karl Popper and John Eccles (a brain expert) wrote The self and its brain, pubd 1977. Popper claims he doesn't subscribe to "thinking substance" because he has problems with the usage of the concept substance. This is why Wittgenstein said philosophers should get day jobs, by which he means get really abreast of the sciences. I am a little surprised at Popper because he must have known by 1977 about half a century of research into new dimensions. Physics by no means excludes the "existence" in some sense of the word, of whatever does thinking, in intersection with those dimensions science is becoming familiar with, and by extension any not "discovered yet". Nor does it exclude that we are each individuals.

What Popper and Eccles both show is that nerve manifestations, sensory, motor and other, while often quicker than what is "consciously" conscious to our memory of it or our power to articulate about it, is not proven to be the original cause of our actions etc.

This is plain honesty about logic and honesty about science and about causes.

Russell (if Feser quotes him accurately) maintained that because physics doesn't tell us about causes, "physics proves there is no such thing as causes". Russell must have been the original of the drunk who never finds his keys anywhere else than under lamp posts. No wonder he didn't manage to ban the bomb!

Real it in quick, before it gets away!

I've known some good experts (including neurologists) but I know what you mean, it all too often works out like that.

I knew what ontic was but couldn't articulate it; thanks to the better ontologists I can now talk about what ontic is as well as ontology.

Fortunately I've often encountered those that didn't see the "need" to have the last world in a world that is bigger than they are, and were willing to bring me up to their level of authority, informally.

Old enough to know what I've seen.

This is about degraded versions of capitalism.

Free will is when we decide to consult our reason about our options, including our options about our mental activities, and then how we decide we want to go ahead with some of them.

In this case Derrida has a good instinct. It is indeed a power thing. Ontic means what I go through and what happens to me, ontological means running to an expert to tell me (at best, they can add to my understanding).

Ask a person with a nerve condition how often they see a neurologist!

Thought experiments are valuable for suggesting possible subject matter for notions or abductions towards potential hypotheses, so they are a lot of steps before verification.

I have got hold of Stanley Jevons and a couple of other decent books. When I get a chance I'll list lots more. There are dozens upon dozens!

I wish I'd been told these things when I was a youngster.

2. So you admit your point was not categorical after all !!!

Admit you have NO IDEA who these people are or why they shouldn’t continue to call themselves by the name of any religion.

3. You sound dismissive of what people go through. What is wrong with associating trouble to a cause? I know a cult that blame the sufferer, they are initially plausible but so cynical. You should stop flinging suffering in people's faces I say!

You say that if anyone has emotion it is pathological. You blame them. You should accept the circumstances of other people's lives (if they are any business of yours) as they are.

We presume you never go through anything yourself!

PU, I love the poem!

Daniel, I think the aesthetic is to help our intuition in the sense of seeing. As for "mystic" apologies for my being non-Ryle-Heidegger-Derrida! By Derrida's own "saying" we are to disagree with him. Heidegger eschews epoche thereby claiming that becoming precludes being, with disastrous consequences in politics, commerce and churches.

From what I've read in the last day or two (in E Feser and W S Jevons), what happened to Descartes was he read too much Averroes and himself misunderstood substance. The contrasting properties of the intangibles that go along with our bodies are what he thought he was trying to refer to.

As for immortal that is more difficult given our perspective on time. As Shamshir hints, some kind of "attrition" has got something to do with it and I think we maintain ourselves (make ourselves sturdier) by certain aspects of our conduct.

I think I have identified this as Romans 2:7. The majority of the missing premises aren't even in Romans at all!

1. I know lots of Christians who say that other Christians are idolators. What about them and where are their emotions and their sin in this (as if it's any of our business)?

2. If one believes something better than all this, it ceases to be pathological. Your argument has failed because it claimed to be categorical. If you had made it weaker, it would be stronger.

3. Not all pain is caused by ourselves. The majority of it as I can see it, is inflicted on us by other people and by the universe, e.g earthquakes, meteorites.

A rationale that is a series of statements of "information" to pick up is one thing and another is when the religion has higher claims in way of life, e.g to nurture the gifts of the lesser members and doesn't live up to them (in churches, the rot set in in about 1150 - in good time to mess up the challenges of the Black Death - and got considerably worse in the 1620s). That is why a religion with higher claims is vulnerable to sabotage by its own leadership, as Nietzsche pointed out, with his lantern in the market place in daytime (for all that he could have edited some of his own writings better) and not long before him, Kierkegaard. Heidegger, who eschews epoche, is the result.

Maybe ... ?

As I am a beginner, and don't know how to translate the notations into real world examples, and as I do much of my thinking visually, please can you give some examples of this "in the round"?

I think tautology in the Wittgensteinian sense is a source of much knowledge though active mental contemplation, which is too much neglected by the public. I am glad to see there are indeed equations for it!

A cook can turn 2 small meat loaves into one bigger one and reroute several currents of smaller power into one bigger one, but not turn two apples into one big one.

I prefer to talk round the subject. I think that revelations may be graded in various qualities. In a remote tribe there may be intersubjectivity both as to its content and its meaning. In a modern wide scale religion across people of not much social coherence otherwise, the content and the meaning will operate in a completely different way. It is so complex, not reams of logical equations can do justice to it. In higher forms, one has to ask, does there form a means of fuelling desirable behaviours e.g some sort of "holy spirit power for caring" so called, or is the corruption in power structures sabotaging that (as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange pointed out is liable to occur for example), or is it all based on coercion and punishment even against outsiders like Asia Bibi, whom the mob have even driven away from the UK. Hence you are right that the response of the members is crucial but that is not only about the fact of their response but also its quality (i.e even something like "belief" has completely different meaning and significance) AND not only about the response of little people but also of the leaders who promote or condone abuses. The values you recommend are laudable. I also advocate a free and easy approach to one's own acceptance of any and all such things. One must be allowed to change one's stance during one's life. British society used to be built on agnosticism of good will (after long periods of intolerance previously and I hope it's not getting back to that).

1. You can't demonstrate that everybody that believes in a religion is an idolater (that the head of their house is a liar) just because it is true for some of them. To get me to agree with the latter is easy. However it is not a sufficient condition to extend to significant exceptions. You could say "it is sad that so many . . ." which you can build an argument on, but you have not said this, so we are not able to reflect what might make somebody (of any religion or none) break out of that vicious circle.

2. You need to be challenged about your category of so called "Abrahamic" and "Abrahamists" who have about as much in common as those in the phone book with surname beginning A, i.e the same as if their surnames were across several letters of the alphabet.

Those calling themselves muslim for example don't have Abraham, they have Ibrahim, much of whose life story is different from the other man's.

Then Hebrews use a very cut down version of the concept of Abraham of Christians (assuming you can find any Christians with ideas that overlap at all), but sometimes with other conflicting additions, of all different kinds of meanings and connotations.

So, there is no such category of any meaningfulness.

Furthermore, it isn't clear how your grouping of "A - brahamic / -sts" actually advances any of your arguments. Did you intend to confine your point to those diverse groupings only, and why - because people of all other belief systems (and none) are surely also of interest in the context of your thread title. You have not furnished reasons for the parameters of the information you present.

3. I was aware that numerical values were built into the wording of old manuscripts that had to be copied, as a double check on accuracy. The material was mostly passed on orally but at an advanced stage in training, practitioners were inducted into the art of preserving the content in recorded form. For example, Eliezer has value 318 and that occurs near the figure 318. The same was done in early Sanskrit. General literacy among Hebrews dates from the exile.

It might at a pinch be slightly interesting to know a little of how some people have got value out of lettering, in connection with the subject matter, but you have taken a very long time to introduce your two points. You could try harder to see which angle(s) we are interested in.

Tim, the question was whether the question of what "decides what" "is" science and what "isn't", gets decided by confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions. I saw the real peril as the conflation of the two types of logical conditions WITHIN each field of study, since there is such a lot of overlap in systematic methods in all fields (in otherwords "demarcation" isn't much of an issue for me). It is people who are practising science dishonestly that do harm, not an impersonalised reified "field" itself, but the field of manipulative robotics that is so prominent these days is a field where increasingly, nearly all practise of it is, sad to say, dishonest.

It is probably more to do with "time" (which is "curved" anyway) than with "spaces".

start quotes

The problem is not calling some things science and some non-science, it is calling them science or non-science arbitrarily, and then using that label to promote the things labeled 'science' and to ridicule or dismiss the ones labeled 'non-science'. If they are not called science or non-science according to consistent criteria, then they are labeled arbitrarily. You keep implying that such criteria exist, what are they? I described how a lot of 'non-science' follows 'the scientific method', so whether something is called science or non-science isn't determined by whether it follows 'the scientific method'.

Sure if you want we can try ourselves. So if we define science as what follows the "scientific method", and non-science as what doesn't follow the "scientific method", then how do we characterize that method so that it includes everything that we call science and excludes everything that we call non-science? If we talk of observations and experiments, that includes a whole lot of what we call non-science. If we talk of making hypotheses and comparing predictions and observations, that includes a whole lot of what we call non-science as well. If we talk of what can be verified, that excludes what we call science. If we talk of what can be falsified, that excludes what we call science (contrary to popular belief scientific theories can always be saved from falsification). If we talk of accumulating knowledge, that includes a lot of what we call non-science.

I'll use my favorite quote from Stephen Jay Gould again. I've used it at least once this week. He is referring to biological evolution - “In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’”

end quotes

What turns the public off science (without understanding why) is firstly the conflating of necessary and sufficient conditions, or cause and effect, within the subject matter of specific studies.

This has got nothing to do with a demarcation problem as every field of investigation and study falls within “science”, loosely described, if one can apply a system of appropriate methods, experimental, observational, analytical etc. Some people used to contrast “arts” which are creative and also applied technology (these draw on sciences of course).

Secondly they are put off by the image being projected that one has to be so categorical instead of tentative. Gould’s word “provisional” seems to recognise that a little. Talk of revolutions and falsifying can be inappropriate if misused. Yes sudden growth has occurred, yes we should always build into our suppositions an element that can be shown to be different – which mostly happens in the form of nuancing.

We should always keep lots of hypotheses on the table, also plenty of “notions” or “abductions” which are I think the ideas for hypotheses. It is in deciding whether these have been tested that confusion about necessary and sufficient conditions creeps in. Also, one never knows when we need to stop looking into a matter – the answer probably is, never.

"" The dualism of Descartes has hamstrung this discussion of ‘soul’ for centuries. If we follow the chronological path of modern philosophy through Descartes, we arrive at exactly where we are now: trying to understand what consciousness is and why we can’t seem to connect mind and body, while discounting ancient religious documents as failing to take into account modern philosophical or scientific thought - and then wondering at the gaps in philosophical or scientific thought.

The nature and capacity of the human mind enables us to explore connections that have little to do with their chronological proximity or their use of common language terms. These connections in philosophy are the content of human experience. How we experience the world as human beings essentially hasn’t changed for thousands of years. ...

But we also have a tendency to fear, deny our fear of and then compartmentalise what we don’t understand - in other words, we haven’t been connecting or collaborating very well in many key areas of discussion.

When did philosophy abandon poetic language as a tool for connecting human experience? Rational language fails at the edge of reasoning and logic, but you can’t deny that human experience exists well beyond it... ""

“”Can you see what is happening now? We have arrived at the point where our reason is driving us to exceed the boundaries of Biblical scripture to make sense of the concept, "soul". And it will, for sure, take us to the territory of "philosophy of mind" where, perhaps, the most serious issue is to try and understand the "connection" between "mind" and "body". If you are interested in this - from a western point of view - we will, I think, have to go back to Descartes, leading us into the modern period of philosophy, especially with his rationalism in epistemology. … his thinking subject (res cogitans) and extended thing (res extensa). For Descartes there runs a line of division between these two realities: the mind on the one hand and the physical body on the other hand. He argues that although the mind is connected to the body, it is capable of existing without the body. In other words, the mind is a substance, because it has self-existence, being able to exist on its own. Isn't this exactly what we've got in cases where people are defending the Christian notion of a "soul" which survives the death of the physical body? If "soul" and "mind" are identical, we will really have to think carefully if we want to defend the notion of a human mind being able to exist independently from a live physical body. ... “”

I think a lot of harm ensued by an insistence by (perhaps) "Aristotelians" on a term "substance" to describe more than one kind of "thing" or "stuff". We will have cultivated quality of will and attitude to memories, and I think circumstances will defy any facile idea of "exist" or "continue".

Rather than compartmentalising and fail to collaborate as lamented above, in my opinion we ought to apply "epoche" (an affirming agnosticism about very respectable antinomies) because we can proceed far on almost all other issues without particularly "deciding" this one. Any suggestions by me for one are just that - splatters on the "art wall". If we're not sure what "continue" will mean in the circumstances, because those will stretch the word too far, at the verbal level it becomes the case that the case will be ostensibly "so" and "not so" simultaneously. That's because at our ordinary level, we can make words and situations coincide in reference more easily.

(And I don't like séances either.)

The parallel loads produced by connection in parallel as described, are a mechanical way of transforming from a continuum of quantities to integers, like using a knife to slice a long stretch of salami, or like when an island in a river causes a separate flow each side. This paradoxical part of the philosophy of mathematics has fascinated me since infancy. Apples are integers whereas the electric current, or a long stretch of salami, are a continuum of quantities, and we have discovered ways of treating the latter as if it were the former.

You are reproducing the reasoning of Michael Yoo, very well.

What makes it in this case not a ponens is that the detail that is understood by the writer and his readers is matters like, whether there is symmetry in their god's treatment of life and death issues, how to unpack the concept of "well doing", what facets of everyday life are being referred to in the phrase "this life", what indeed powers or fuels the things implied (not just "people pleasing" or ingratiating, I fancy).

The extract is not a complete treatment of the subject in itself and may not have been part of a complete treatise. The bulk of the subject matter may have been given to the recipients orally, by this writer and / or other persons.

It is fascinating to wonder what is considered an "explanation". Much good is done by keeping talking round a subject, in fresh words, hinting at fresh angles.