Comments

  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    I don't deny that people who have had life-changing encounters with uncreated light may be deluded. I just don't believe they are. — Art48
    I may have missed it but tell us (again?) why – on what basis – you "don't believe ... encounters with uncreated light" are delusions.
  • Where Philosophy Went Wrong
    ↪Fooloso4
    :clap: Yes, it seems the sophists have won, taking over the academy (pace Plato et al). Old story though, at least since the scholastics.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    ↪Andrew4Handel
    What?
  • Karma. Anyone understand it?
    ↪TiredThinker
    I interpret karma as 'moral habit' and less broadly, in a (vaguely) Buddhist sense, as 'the moral habit of de/attachment'. Why 'moral'? Because karma, I think, concerns how one lives daily, moment to moment, and treats – relates to – other living creatures. I suppose my interpretive bias is both aretaic and pragmaticist contra the ancient dharmic, or supernaturalist, connotations (e.g. "wheel of rebirth", etc).
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    I am not sure what your theory of language is but I don't think we can talk about things that don't exist. — Andrew4Handel
    The word "self" (like "god") exists and we use – "talk about" – it meaningfully and incessantly (re: Meinong's Jungle, Witty's language games, etc).
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    ↪Wayfarer
    I asked an honest, epistemic question of you because, if I'm not mistaken, you are a learned student / practicioner of comparative religions and mystical traditions. I have no reason to doubt that you gave an honest (by your lights) and informed answer, yet, even though, I've charitably interpreted your response as insufficiently epistemic. Now you're irritated that you've been found out – again – either as not so learned or a shallow dupe or both.

    Asking inconvenient questions, Wayfarer, is in the best Socrstic tradition – examining (acid testing) assumptions. Whatever else you are, sir, are you not also a student-practicioner of philosophy? My apologies if I'm (again) mistaken and have given you more credit than is warranted. Anyway, I'll move along with my midday lantern looking for a principled thinker who can handle inconvenient, simple questions like these. G'day. :smirk:
  • James Webb Telescope
    If these findings hold up ... :yikes: :cool:
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    ↪Wayfarer
    Ah I see, you are convinced by mere anecdotes (i.e. appeal to popularity). That shows, sir, what assuming "supernatural experiences" amount to (i.e. it's delusional) and therefore why the OP is incoherent. As for what you apparently "understand" about neuroscience ... :eyes: :sweat:
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    ↪Wayfarer
    :ok: So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" even though you believe that people do and/or that you have had them.

    Yeah, it's like asking 'how can a person who was born blind have color experiences even though s/he claims to see red or recognize faces without touching them'. I'm serious about calling 'believing is seeing' into question, Wayf, as delusional (or deceitful) in the absence of squaring this empirical / phenomenological circle. :chin:
  • Simplicity of naturalist vs. theist hypothesis claims
    While the naturalist claims that the things that exist in the natural world are consistent, they fail to acknowledge the inconsistency with the first cause of the universe. — Ishika
    As far as we know, the universe began with a planck radius and events at the planck scale are random (i.e. a-causal), so the claim that 'the universe has a first cause' is, at best, inconsistent with contemporary scientific cosmology.

    It is a natural law that every cause has an effect, so the naturalist must affirm that.
    It's a definition, not a "natural law", of an "effect" that it has at least one "cause". We naturalists, partiicularly of the scientific persuasion, use the term event instead due to the fact of the orders of magnitude predominance of random events in (excitations of) planck-scale fields over non-planck-scale (classical) phenomena such as (e g.) particle interactions and vacuum fluctuations.

    Yet, they fail to provide a theory that is consistent with the natural law for how the world was initially created.
    This is not true. Re: quantum gravity. Besides, all of the demonstable evidence in cosmology and astrophysics supports models that "the universe was not created"(e.g. has higher than predicted structural complexity in the early observable universe).

    The initial cause, according to theists, is God.
    I can't refute this nostrum any more succinctly than Galileo did over four centures ago ...
    The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

    Naturalists (including materialists-physicalists) have an unparalleled, unrefuted, track-record of producing knowledge of and about the universe. Whatever its limitations as a philosophical paradigm or scientific methodology, naturalism provides the least consistent accounts for the origin of the universe except for all the other non-natural (e.g. idealist, teleological, supernatural, mythological, etc) accounts given so far. By contrast, theists have only ever produced superstitious fairytales which too many people still live by and console themselves with via ritually pacifying their false fears with equally false hopes.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    Yet language is our killer app. — plaque flag
    Sure.
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/799982
    However, memetics ain't language any more than shapes are clouds or events are time.
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    @Tom Storm @plaque flag
    ↪Wayfarer
    How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). :chin:
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    ↪plaque flag
    I'm not persuaded that 'memetics' explains much. And Dennett's later work seems to mostly be earlier work rehashed / reformulated. I've barely skimmed his last few books.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    Memes on top of genes that were built to host them ? — plaque flag
    So the 'biosemiotic story' goes ...
  • 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:
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