What do you mean by philosophical sophistication? You said Aquinas was an atheist (yes) but give Essence and Existence are overview. It's sophisticated in a way

I've read Phenomogy of Mind twice and Philosophy of Mind 3 times. There wasn't a sentence I didn't understand

I bet you don't know how to read Hegel. Yet you say he wasn't sophisticated, or would say so if you read him

Hegel says at the end of Philosophy of Mind:

1) you are the Holy Ghost

2) your reasoning powers (logos) is Jesus

3) you memory is that Father

so he was an atheist. But you said he was a good philosopher

None do

you need laws of nature at the very least, otherwise you're just a pragmatist/instrumentalist. When you start asking for justification of those laws themselves, then God comes into it. — Dharmi

Materialists consider it common sense to believe in science. A 'higher order" justification doesn't seem necessary

Well I don't know if I can say anything profound about your distinction. Emotions define us much and whether there is a substrate for them has always been debated. Since I started with Descartes let me use him as an example of someone who tried to understand his psychology in terms of a soul united to a mechanical body of a particular kind. He, in his most honest moments, would hav to admit that the animal spirits mentioned long ago by the Alexandrian school of Herophilos and Erasistratus were indeed very alive. And that the fiery substance he felt in his ventricles were as much his as his mind. So it seems we are very clever mammals who are obsessed with understanding ourselves

Yes it's hard not to generalize. Thanks for the admonition

That's a really good start. I believe psychology is broad enough to give a great description of human nature and that keeping fields of study apart is a hindrance to holistic thinking on the subject. I saw something today by the Dalai Lama who said that quantum physics shows we all 1) share one energy 2) create our own reality, and 3) essentially live in eternity. These are near ideas but they are taking scientific ideas waaaay too far. Starting with some materialist basics is important. Your 8 starting points are good and I'm not going to argue with people who reject them. A saw a video recently by vsauce of "why we wear clothes". His answer was "because we are smart". We take so long to develop because are capacity for abstract thought is so high. We NEED to be selective in reproducing because children require a lot of care in order to grow up and become psychologists or quantum physicists. Otherwise our species will fall apart. I think this adds to what you were saying

I've been doing some more research, and I think when Descartes refers to the pineal gland as a "penis" (check out the SEP article on Descartes and the gland) he is viewing the back of the throat as genitalia. The uvala does look like a penis and the adenoids are what medieval physicians thought moved when making moral choices. They could be seen as testicals and the pineal gland as the prostate. Descartes means the whole apparatus is like a genital. I'm fascinated by this

I don't know why theists think "God" will guarantee the validity of science. All he might do is interfere with scientific studies in any ways he wishes in order to produce "faith". All they are left with is the subjective, just as they say is the case with materialists

Minute 5 to 7. People seem to make up stories as to why they do things and "believe their own shit" so to speak. Since no one so far has referenced studies in this area, it IS hard to discuss this further
nonetheless.

I guess

I'm looking through your links now. Descartes thought the 6 experiences of life were love, hatred, passion, wonder, joy, and sadness. He was sure every other emotion (fear, anxiety, depression, mania) resulted from a mal-use of one of these primal experiences. What coordinates them is generosity (an act of will, using the 6 sensations in proper order). What I am aiming at in this thread is whether the fundamental features of the human psyche can even be definitely determined and codified. Genes change and if it's impossible to determine human nature from philosophy, psychology seems to be only capable of general vague suggestions

Science assumes "identical OBJECTS act identically in identical situations", not that "ideas" or "blank" act in this way. That's how they are able to do physics at all. They recognize what matter IS ( "esse")

Science not only assumes that matter must exist, but puts our species on the same level as others and does not judge (yet) which has the greatest awareness. The answer could be a bee, therefore if our consciousness reduces to the same exact number of firings a bee has, we might find the greatest level of awareness

Some comments:

The subtle body is alleged to have a chakra which is above the head like a halo. Does it originate from the pineal gland like daytime dream sequences? I don't know if any type of experiment that could prove this. Science has assumptions and it's first assumption is "assume it's material unless proven otherwise"

Actually, I think dinosaurs were reptilian birds

The immaterial is not supernatural (grace). These are different experiences. The former is akin to experiences on shrooms. As for the brain (which it might all come from) if you have a brain stem and some other cerebral activity you can have consciousness. Fish and reptiles only have brain stems basically. A fish (interestingly) is older than the dinosaurs and reptiles are a type of dinosaur.

I think Sam Harris's point was that people had pre-coffee thoughts as to how to be friendly and the coffee kicked these thoughts into gear

Any experiment that tries to show that you didn't do what you did because of what you consciously thought was the subjective cause would have to be very intricate

Is not "where consciousness is located" a debated question?

Unfortunately, the friend who told me about these types of studies got addicted to Fentanyl last year and it's likely he's dead. I haven't heard from him in awhile. But he was smart and always represented what he read in science fairly. Sam Harris mentions these types of studies at the end of this short video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTEmu-jUqA

People, just as they feel like they have complete free will, also feel like they know what exactly why they are recallingideas. However,

these two things seem to conflict. — InPitzotl

if the researcher flashes the picture of a chicken and the person immediately says "chicken", the researcher's gonna think it's just because of the picture he sent to the subjects mind. But the subject has a subjective reason as to why he said chicken. Now maybe they are not contradictory. Maybe the signal made the subject's brain think of chicken and in the subjects mind he remembered something about chickens and believes this alone was the reason. However, they are becoming very sophisticated in science where they can tease out these factors and know when something is known (by the subject) subconsciously only and when it's in the conscious mind

The qualitative actions we determine and initiate without conscious deliberation don’t require certainty or logic. They’re probabilistically determined based on an ongoing prediction of attention and effort (from our conceptual reality) in relation to an ongoing interoception of affect. — Possibility

Yes

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s meta-analyses of psychology/neuroscience research in relation to constructed emotion concepts supports this. — Possibility

Good, more information. My friend had said that the object of the study was to prove that people fool themselves all the f-ing time about what they REALLY think.

Did the experimenters include exotic animals, insects, birds, animals that people generally have never encountered in their lives, even on TV? — TheMadFool

You're right, the study would have to be very controlled. How much we fool ourselves is something psychology maybe, perhaps, be able to answer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli — unenlightened

Ah, thank you

Are you familiar with the study that John Lorber conducted? — Dharmi

Not yet, but I will look it up. Thanks

As many Pyrhonnians in history have concluded, the infinite is contained in the finite so there really isn't a distinction between the two

This paradox correlates with Mr. Zeno's paradox ( "The paradox of the large and the small"). Aristoteleans say quantum mechanics is weird because it approaches prime matter. But is a leaf closer to prime matter than a tree? Even if matter is pure extension, if you start on the east side of a building and try to get to the smallest limit, you can only go west. So the large IS the small

Marx is fun but being a Hegelian materialist is hard because your mind is overloaded with so many ideas you can't even write properly

Aquinas has a very beautiful style, but it's just that it lacks all excitement that you want to kill yourself after reading him

Thomism is just so dry and boring that I was forced basically to get into Hegel, although his works feel very forced in themselves. I'd bet you have hidden suspicion that your yoga philosophy is somehow unnatural, but Thomists have their share of problems too. My younger brother is one (an actual professor). I started reading the Summa Theologica when I was 13. It got depressing beyond all hell so I started up with sections from Hegel and havent looked back

Interesting

The fire= reason
The sun= The Forms
The whole= God
The Shadows= non-reality

The relationship between "desert Platonism" and "austere Gnosticism" is interesting

Idk. In college they said it meant that matter was like a shadow

I would believe in pure Thomism if it wasnt so depressing and boring

All philosophy will eventually being about a strain

Tim Freke is a popular western philosopher who believes "down up". He thinks evolution will bring the existence of God into existence. A secular Teilhardian

Top down vs. down up? I like epistemic Hegelianism instead of yoga but perhaps it leads to where you are

That sounds like Sun worship. Aquinas, I believe, worshiped the sun, and some Popes called themselves sun kings (like Roman emperors) before King Louis XIV took that title formally. I know because I read history. Scholasticism must be seen without the Catholic Egyptian stuff. But you disregard science and prefer (bhakti) to pray to god or gods. That to me seems very irrational

Yes they were neo-scholastics. I take what is good in their works and disregard the rest

The allegory of the Cave is the most famous example of Plato's opinion on matter

The last dialogue I read was Parmenides. The Forms are pitted against "The One". Plato's references to God are sparingly spread out across his works. I think he called him Zeus (more than likely). Sorry I can't be more specific than that. I haven't read Plato is a few years

Suarez and Rosmini are some of my favorite thinkers. The former was Spanish, the latter was Italian

Many today ask "what is consciousness". I don't like it because it's one dimensional. How can anyone answer that question from that angle!? We have reason and will, which are powers that emerge from the part of matter evolution gave you as a body. There is a great recent thread on this forum about emergence, with many great articles cited in it. Something greater can truly come from something less by the way you come what is below (atoms and cells). We are only connected to the rest of the world in how the world effects our body (at the quantum level even). You seem to have a Eastern way of thinking. In the West there are those who believe the soul and body are separate, and those who believe they are one. I think they are one unit that acts as a whole. Not a form with prime matter maybe (Aristotle) but maybe just matter acting at a higher level because of the complexity in the geometry of the brain

The One of Plotinus is not a mind. It's pure potentiality, the "ideal being" of Rosmini. The system of Plotinus wasn't completed until Antonio Rosmini in the 18 hundreds. Ideal being is what we experience as innate in our minds. It is pure potential and we mold it with our will. The second level of Plotinus has mind, Logos, which is God. This is new ( "neo") Platonism though. Pure Platonism has infinite geometrical "ideal" (quasi-mental) Forms separate from God and the One (the later which supposedly connects our mind to God and rationality)t

The forms for Plato are a true external object for the understanding, not coming from God but instead existing on their own. This is what Aristotle objected too. Other interpretations simply reduce what Aristotle said to nothing