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  • Philosophical implications of contacting higher intelligences through AI-powered communication tools
    If humanity does make contact with a higher intelligence, through the use of AI-powered communication tools, what sort of philosophical implications does that have for humanity? — Bret Bernhoft
    Well, I can think of three immediate "implications": Contact

    • confirms Singularity hypothesis – "'Higher intelligence' (terrestrial or not) ends / inexplicably accelerates 'human history'"

    • resolves Fermi's Paradox – "We are not alone", "They got past the Great Filter" & "Are they machines or organisms?"

    • puts the Dark Forest hypothesis to the test!. :eyes:

    An excerpt from a recent post ...
    Btw, talking to one of nephews today (who's not yet thirty, working in finance & tech) the "Fermi Paradox" came up and by the end of that part of the discussion, maybe fifteen minutes later, I concluded that there's no paradox after all because, in the (local) universe, there are probably exponentially more extraterrestrial intelligent machines (ETIM) – which are not detectable yet by us and therefore we are of no interest to those xeno-machines – than there are non-extinct extraterrestrial intelligent species (ETIS) whose thinking machine descendants are exploring the universe and leaving behind their makers to carry on safely existing in boundless, virtual worlds. "The Great Silence" is an illusion, I remarked, for those who don't have post-Singularity ears to hear the "Music of the Spheres" playing between and beyond the stars. Maybe, universeness, you agree with the young man who told me, in effect, that my cosmic scenario diminishes human significance to ... Lovecraftian zero. :smirk: — 180 Proof
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    ↪plaque flag
    Like tautologies, 'p-zombiies' are devoid of content. They are merely there (à la Chinese Rooms).
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    Granted that it's an invention, does it persist because it accomplishes something ? — plaque flag
    "It persists", it seems to me, because "self" might be a kind of cognitive (memory) bias related to emotion-enabled scenario-planning and judgmemt (Damasio).

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

    update:
    Brains model worlds. In order to construct an “objective” view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully “other” itself as the “subjective” part of that viewing.

    [ .... ]

    A classic example from ecological perception is landing a plane on a runway. The pilot fixes on a landing spot and just maintains a steady optic flow. So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. Two halves of the psychological equation. The wider world is likewise reduced to a continuous flow. The brain is modelling reality in a cleanly divided fashion which is not a model of the world, but a model of us in the world as the world’s still and purposeful centre, with the world then passing by in a smooth and predictable manner.     — apokrisis
    :fire: :100:
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    ↪plaque flag
    What do I make of "wondering at a tautology" in this thread? Well, for a start, that p-zombies are tautologies and subjective beings are contradictions ...

    Doers are fictional / conventional (essentially social) foci of responsibility. — plaque flag
    :up:
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    But what do you make of 'wondering at a tautology'? — plaque flag
    More context plesse.

    Do you see/feel why this confusion is tempting?
    I suspect you agree with Freddy ...

    But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. — On the Genealogy of Morals
    Philosophers, more than most, are 'bewitched by language', no?

    Thank you for the kind words ! Especially from you they are valued.

    Well played.
    :cool:
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    Every skull wears an acquired face and calls it "self". I suspect that language – word-fetishizing – is why "the myth of self endures".

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    So it's hard to call the universe an organism, because it has no environment. Life climbs a ladder. It 'shits' more disorder than it creates. — plaque flag
    Things tend to fall apart, but here we are, strange primates, increasing in complexity, godlike cyborgs, now creating synthetic brains better than our own. Even from the outside, we are not [just] drifting spacerock. — plaque flag
    We can take an external view and look at patterns that stubbornly resist being erased. The pattern doesn't 'want' to die. — plaque flag
    Philosophy makes darkness visible, drags ignorance into the light, wakes up the marching zombie. — plaque flag
    qualia are slippery eels. — plaque flag
    :fire: :100: I'm jazzed by the way you dance!

    As I discern things, there is no "hard problem" for scientists, just another hard confusion that semantically bewitches philosophers.

    @schopenhauer1
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    The core of every reality is, Reality. — IP060903
    :ok:

    sparks, fire ...
    light rays, sun ...
    waves, ocean ...
    ten thousand things, dao ...
    natura naturata, natura naturans ...

    Tat Tvam Asi. Aham Brahma Asmi. Para Brahman.

    When the retina is deprived of oxygen, it fails to send a signal to the brain, which is interpreted as white light.

    Hypoxia mistaken for ontology.     — Banno
    :clap: Moksha (and yet this truth won't set them free).

    ↪Wayfarer
    :roll:
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    Nothing matters in the universe other than some relation to a subject. — schopenhauer1
    And this "matters ... to a subject" doesn't matter.

    Does changing the word to adaptive intelligence change much?
    Obviously I think it does. Consciousness =/= adaptive intelligence, especially in the context in which I've used these terms.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    Much depends on one's ontology. If it doesn't include God, then obviously experience of God is impossible. If it includes an ultimate ground of existence, then how can we not experience "it", if that is what we are, if we are literally its image? — Art48
    'Believing is seeing' is known as projection or confirmation bias. "How can" folks who believe that there are angels, unicorns & abducting UFOs "not experience" them? :roll:
  • What are your philosophies?
    ↪Fooloso4
    :fire:
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    ↪universeness
    :up:
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    Descriptions differ but experiences may be similar or identical. — Art48
    It seems to me more likely than not that these "experiences" are "similar or identical" cognitive illusions.
  • A life without wants
    ↪Janus
    :smirk:
  • Martin Heidegger
    The equation of being and time ... — Janus
    I don't think using "being" & "time" as synonyms implies that these terms are equated. Maybe I'm mistaken but they seem to me complementary in H's usage rather than identical.
  • A life without wants
    ↪Janus
    :roll:
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    The nexus between an object being bombarded by effects of the universe and and an object being bombarded by effects that matters is consciousness. — schopenhauer1
    Both objects and subjects (i.e. phenomenally self-referring/reflexive objects) are emergent "effects of the universe" ... neither of which "matter" on the cosmic scale. "Consciousness" seems the phenomenal illusion of being 'more than an object', even somehow separate / alienated from the rest of universe of objects – more bug than feature; I think, instead of "consciousness", adaptive intelligence (by which knowledge of the universe is created) is the property, or functionality, that distinguishes mere objects from mattering objects.
  • Martin Heidegger
    “In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics) — Joshs
    H uses these terms as synonyms the way (though not for the same reason/s as) Spinoza uses God and Nature.
  • A life without wants
    What would a life without any wants look like? — schopenhauer1
    A coma.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    Das Heilige Geist via Hegel and Holderlin is on target. — Fooloso4
    :cool:
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪Fooloso4
    Thanks for that succinct refresher. :up:
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/790451

    Hermeneutically, a philosopher's pedagogical biography and the cultural context of his or her 'thinking' matter, no? :chin:

    ... and aletheia. — Mikie
    Aka "revelation" (just as authenticity loosely corresponds to "grace" or "piety").

    :halo:

    Regardless of manifest expressions or lack thereof in the post-Husserlian writings leading up to and including (at least) SuZ, the 'structure' (language-speaking) of H's (early?) reflections on 'being', it's reasonable to assume, was markedly influenced – though of course not exclusively determined – by his (early) Jesuit education, studying neo-Thomist theology before switching to neo-Kantian philosophy and writing a habilitation thesis (i.e. PhD dissertation) on the Scholastic theologian-philosopher Dun Scotus. Not long after, H would make a considerable study of 'biblical hermeneutics' (e.g. Dilthey & theologian Schleiermacher) which, reformulated, plays a centrol role in SuZ.

    :pray:

    Over three decades ago I recall first reading SuZ (on my own) – it was several years after my own dozen years of Jesuit schooling and altar boy upbringing – and, despite my subsequently studied and committed atheism, I could not help reading Catholic, even biblical, concepts in between the lines of the text and connotated by H's use of (undefined, cryptic) terms like "being" "authenticity" "ownmost" "resoluteness" "the they" "dasein" "being-towards-death" "forgetting of being" "temporality" etc.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    I think that Heidegger remained open to and accepting of what comes to be because he retained belief in the notion of providence. — Fooloso4
    :up:
    ... à la "the holy ghost" or dao, no?
  • Aesthetic reasons to believe
    What god is there other than the universe? — Janus
    Death.

    '... closer to you thqn your jugular ...'
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    Consciousness seems to be the part of us closest to the ultimate ground of existence, if not actually identical with it. — Art48
    If so, then how is it that a property as fundamental as "consciousness" is so easily and frequently lost (e.g. sleep, head trauma, coma, blackout, etc) as well as altered by commonplace stressors (e.g. drugs, alcohol, sugar, emotions, violence, sex, illness, video games, porn, gambling, social media, etc) if "consciousness is closest to the ultimate ground of existence"? :chin:
  • Morals made simple
    ↪Tom Storm
    :cool:
  • Morals made simple
    ↪jorndoe
    :lol: As Aristotle taught: 'The Geek Life'.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    The YouTube video:
    Anahata (Heart Centre) Experience Sarvapriyananda #shorts
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM3_lPPYbnw&list=LL&index=3     — Art48
    Consider this interview with philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel ...

    ... about the unreliability of introspection (like a brain trying to perceive (e.g. feel) itself or an eye seeing itself. :eyes:) esp. @ 25:00, 31:00 & 48:30

    :chin:

    Has a person who is completely blind from birth ever reported "seeing the uncreated light"? If not, and if such a phenomenon is reported by others, then why hasn't anyone born blind ever "seen the inner light"?
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    i suspect you aren’t too crazy about Foucault, Rorty, social constructionism, Derrida, Deleuze, Nietzsche or Husserl either when it comes to ethics. — Joshs
    Clearly, you're mistaken, Joshs. Foucault, Nietzsche & Deleuze have much to say about ethics (re: "care of the self", "master / slave morality & revaluation of all values" and "anti-oedipal desiring-production", respectively).
  • Heidegger’s Downfall
    @Mikie @plaque flag @Arne @Joshs
    Basic to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is the desire for and pursuit of the good. This must be understood at the most ordinary level, not as a theory but simply as what we want both for ourselves and those we care about. It is not only basic to their philosophy but basic to their understanding of who we are as human beings.

    Phronesis, often translated as practical wisdom, is not simply a matter of reasoning toward
    achieving ends, but of deliberation about good ends.

    For Heidegger consideration of the good is replaced with the call of conscience. The call of conscience is not about what is good or bad, it is the call for authenticity. Its primary concern is not oneself or others but Being. He sees Plato's elevation of the Good above being, that is, as the source of both being and being known, as a move away from, a forgetting of Being.

    In more general terms, how severing reason from the good is nihilism can be seen in the ideal of objectivity and the sequestering of "value judgments". Political philosophy, for example, is shunned in favor of political science. The question of how best to live has no place in a science of politics whose concerns are structural and deal with power differentials.     — Fooloso4
    :fire: :100:

    My own less learned supplement to your wise précis, Fooloso4:
    As specifically relates to H, "resolute" (i.e. subjectivist aka "ownmost") "being-towards-death" makes for "authentic Dasein", reminiscent of soldiering (kamikazi-like), that resonates with a Kierkegaardian "knight of faith's" fervor rationalized by the theodicy of death at the drum-beating heart of H's SuZ. "Authenticity" – purportedly the highest subjectivist (and historicist) goal – is the hymn of this Absolute (which for H's Dasein is (my) "death") invoked as en-chanting (i.e. "jargoning" Adorno suggests) in lieu of, or over above, public reasoning. — 180 Proof
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪plaque flag
    I'll stick with Freddy's less charitable premonition of Heidi's willful lack of clarity.
  • Martin Heidegger
    ↪Tom Storm
    H promotes "misunderstanding" both with the obscurant sophistry of his texts and rare, explicit statements such as
    Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by ‘facts,’ i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. — Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Notes 1936-1938

    Note N's prescient criticism sixty-something years before:
    Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water. — The Gay Science, 173

    (Emphases are mine.)

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/637153
  • Thinking different
    DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS — on a sign in the Agora
  • Thinking different
    Still spending more time on style over substance but what do I know. — invicta
    Res ipsa loquitur. :roll:
  • What are your philosophies?
    ↪Tom Storm
    Thanks.
  • Thinking different
    Eat an apple; you know what an apple tastes like. — EnPassant
    In this sentence "you know", it seems to me, only does the work of "you experience".

    ... many ways of knowing
    I prefer to be less ambiguous, or colloquial, here: there are ways of knowing, believing, experiencing, remembering, imagining as well as ways of interpreting those ways. Only that which is '(in principle) publicly demonstrable – irrational to deny – by everyone' denotes knowing something as used in epistemology to distinguish from not-knowing something.

    and many facets of reality to know.
    And this expresses what you know? believe? experience? remember? imagine? ... interpret?
  • Thinking different
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    Non sequiturs. Wait till the dialogue plays out some more for more context.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    Wasn't Spinoza an idealist in all but name? — sime
    Spinoza isn't "an idealist" according to my reading.

    As for Epicurus, as an empirically minded philosopher, didn't he stress the epistemic primacy, if not ontological primacy of sense-data?
    Yes.

    I'm also not seeing any real points of disagreement between the ontological arguments of Berkleley and Epircurus.
    I can't help you with that. :sweat:
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    Metaphysics by definition is prior to physics. — HarryHarry
    This is not how Aristotle conceived and taught his First Philosophy with respect to his Physics. The word 'metaphysics' literally means 'the book after the book on physics'. It is meant to consist of categorical generalizations about nature derived from studying the many domains and particularities of nature. In other words, one must know nature (i.e. physics) in order to understand the principles / limits of physics (i.e. metaphysics). I'm no Aristotlean (I'm much more of an Epicurean-Spinozist) but I'm sure Plato's best – most renown – pupil didn't put the metaphysical cart before the physical horse. That's clearly a modern idealist's (or p0m0's) mistake. :smirk:
  • What are your philosophies?
    Here's a more conventional reformulation of this breezy synopsis
    ↪180 Proof
    ...

    'My philosophy' has mainly consisted of these -isms:

    i. ontological naturalism – Whatever else the whole of reality consist in, reason is embodied in, or immanent to, an unbounded dynamic structure of causal relations and stochastic micro-events that constrains-enables its explicability to embodied reason. This immanently explicable, unbounded, causal-stochastic, dynamic structure aka "nature" (phusis, natura naturans, dao) is real in the maximal sense of manifesting the ineluctable conditionality, or contingency, of the totality of its constituents and, therefore, the entirety (such as it is) of itself.

    NB: From this ontology I derive the epistemic concepts of "material" (re: non-formal data) and "physical" (re: formally modeled non-formal data); I use both terms as non-reductive interpretations – descriptive-levels – of "nature".

    ii. ethical naturalism – Humans suffer. As a member of the same species, each individual has the same defects as all other h sapiens, which are learned as the 'theory of mind' is acquired by each of us. Deprivation or neglect of these species defects (e.g. hunger, thirst, shelter, sleep, touch, esteem, personal-social bonds, relaxation, health, hygiene, trust, safety, etc) causes discomfort, even dysfunction – suffering (or worse). These are facts of nature (re: h. sapiens); we cannot not know this. We can avoid, prevent or reduce deprivations & neglect; this fact we also cannot not know. Suffering itself solicits relief from, or help to reduce, suffering. Through practice sufferers develop habits which both help and do not help to reduce the suffering of other sufferers and/or themselves. Through reflective practice – ethics – sufferers can unlearn habits which tend not to help to reduce suffering, etc.

    Given this (barely sketched) naturalized ethical framework (tailored for 'beasts, not angels'), my normative morality is Negative Hedonic Utilitarianism (Right personal judgment & conduct reduces harm) and applied morality is Negative Preference Consequentialism (Right public policy reduces injustice). Reflectively exercising these moral practices daily tends to both cultivate adaptive habits which help to reduce suffering (i.e. virtues) and unlearn maladaptive habits which do not help to reduce suffering (i.e. vices).

    addendum:
    Psychological suffering from maladapting (re: stupidity) to ineluctable, physical change (re: entropy)

    iii. pragmatic naturalism – It's an effin' kluge:
    • Popper's falsificationism (re: knowledge) +
    • Haack's foundherentism (re: belief) +
    • Lakoff's embodied mind (re: cognition) +
    • Metzinger's self-modeling non-reductive physicalism (re: cognition) +
    • Hawking & Mlodinow's model-dependent realism (re: cosmology)

    iv. ecological-economic democratism – My secular, leftist critique of 'hegemonic neoliberalism' consists in proposing a hybrid of deep ecology + economic democracy or, in other words,
    an orderly, accountable process of de-centralizing 'scarcity-producing, shareholder dominance hierarchies' into (federated) regimes of stakeholder control (and/or ownership) of industry, finance & governance wherein local-regional-hemispheric ecosystems are also stakeholders (i.e. legal wards of local, regional or hemispheric (non-commercial) organizations) along with workers and affected communities.
    This proposal is not a political action-plan, or manifesto; rather, it is a secular, post-marxist attempt at critically de-naturalizing – subverting, even strategically sabotagizing – the status quo 'paralysis' of neoliberal pollutionists & diversionary identity-politricksters.

    v. antitheism – An argument against the sine qua non claims of theism and not against g/G itself.
    The theistic g/G-type is shown to be empty, therefore its g/G-tokens are fictions.
    I'm persuaded by the Apophatics: How is it that anything but silence with respect to a g/G-token of theism is not indistinguishable from idolatry (or even, in theists' own religious terms, "blasphemous")? I am, however, agnostic about any g/G-type that does not consist of theism's sine qua non claims (e.g. "Deus, sive Natura").


    :death: :flower:

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/843433
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