Comments

  • The “Supernatural”
    Do you mean presently-known laws of nature or known and unknown laws of nature. — Art48
    In principle any (mathematized) laws of nature. Remember: 20th c Conservation Laws are not significantly inconsistent with 17th c Newtonian Laws of Motion.
  • Our relation to Eternity
    ↪invicta
    Whenever 'nothing matters' crosses your mind remember that thought also includes 'and it doesn't matter that "nothing matters"' and then go on making yourself matter in your own eyes by mattering to someone else.

    Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

    :death: :flower:
  • Refute that, non-materialists!
    ↪Tom Storm
    I'm a philosophical naturalist (paradigm) which includes both m-physicalism (models) and m-materialism (data), and I have no bleepin' idea what the OP is about.

    Almost 4am here. Zzzzzz :yawn:
  • The “Supernatural”
    ↪Tom Storm
    "Blessed are the gullible ..." :smirk:
  • The “Supernatural”
    ↪Tom Storm
    :up:
  • Arguments for why an afterlife would be hidden?
    ↪TiredThinker
    It couldn't be "hidden" from us because a "nonphysical afterlife" is, by definition, imperceptible to physical perception, otherwise it would be physical enough to reflect photons and/or generate sound waves.
  • The “Supernatural”
    ↪Bylaw
    Interesting, but I'm not proposing 'elimination by induction' in the post you cited.
  • Spinoza’s Philosophy
    ↪Gnomon
    I wasn't responding to a post with any philosophical content, so I gave back what I got, sir. And no surprise, again you decline the opportunity to engage in philosophical dialectic by addressing the questions put you about your speculations. It's not an ad hominem when an argument wasn't made and the subject actually confirms the criticisms. Nice job. :clap: :lol:
  • The “Supernatural”
    ↪Art48
    Well, what do you think of my criterion for "proof" of the supernatural in my previous post just before yours, Art?
  • Time and Boundaries
    ↪jgill
    Don't hold me to this but I vaguely recall that Heisenberg et al's matrix mechanics (re: possible-states of observables) provides a non-mystical, though experimentally equivalent, alternative to Schrödinger's wave mechanics (re: particles as classical waves). Something about Feynmann's path-integrals plays a decisive role in extending the scope of matrices, doesn't it? Yeah, I don't know wtf I'm talking about, jgill, but somebody with real QM chops is bound to come along who can talk mathematical physics to a mathematician. :sweat:
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Janus
    :up: :up:

    What do you think?
    By transcendental realism I understand 'the inquiry of how reality must be in order for scientific models to be possible'.
  • Time and Boundaries
    ↪ucarr
    After I posted. It's clear as mud to me.
  • Time and Boundaries
    forward-flowing of history — ucarr
    "Forward-flowing" is a cognitive illusion and intuitive way of talking about asymmetric change. "History" represents time-as-past-tense-narrative (i.e. a ghost story). Particle physicists refer to worldlines (or many-worlds branchings) and statistical mechanics refer to entropy gradients. I still don't see what your musings, ucarr, have to do with philosophy. What's the philosophical itch you're trying to get us to scratch? State it plainly.
  • The Dialectic of Atheism and Theism: An Agnostic's Perspective
    ... the distinction of 'what exists' and 'what is' has to be discerned. — Wayfarer
    Here's where I depart from philosophical convention (tradition): anachronistic "what is" (or "to be") is merely a sentence fragment – placeholder – that does not say anything. I find Epicurus' void (or even Spinoza's substance) a more intelligible concept than "being" and that atoms (or modes, respectively) correspond to "beings" (i.e. things, events, facts) which exist in particular.
  • Time and Boundaries
    This is all arse-about. — Banno
    :smirk:
  • The “Supernatural”
    How's it known that something is "inconsistent with the laws of nature"? — ItIsWhatItIs
    I think that to observe a change in nature which – within the constraints of the 'laws of nature' – could not be caused, even in principle, by any natural event, force, or agent, this would imply that that causal "something" is inconsistent with – not constrained by – the 'laws of nature'.
  • The Dialectic of Atheism and Theism: An Agnostic's Perspective
    God and nature are not identical — EnPassant
    So theists and deists, acosmists and pandeists belueve.
  • Spinoza’s Philosophy
    What little I know of Spinozas worldview is second-hand, not directly from the source. Nevertheless, I often note the similarity of his Deus Sive Natura god-model to my own PanEnDeistic model — Gnomon
    As someone who has studied Spinoza for decades and has also read hundreds of your posts (as well as snippets of your verbose blog), I assure you, sir, Spinozism (re: acosmism) and your "PanEnDeistic god-model" (i.e. "Enformer"-of-the-gaps) are not "similar" in any non-trivial way.. :sweat:

    TO BE CONTINUED . . . . . .
    :roll:

    'Your answers' to the wrong (uninformed) questions, Gnomon, don't matter and never will, mostly because, as you confess
    What little I know ... is second-hand, not directly from the source ...
    which applies not only to Spinoza but also, as discussions with you by myself and others incorrigibly make clear, to both modern philosophies and contemporary formal & physical sciences.

    Of course, you can disabuse me / us of this "bias", Gnomon, by raising your game (which, apparently, you can't :smirk:) and answering these old questions ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/709894

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718369

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/742056     — 180 Proof

    @universeness @Janus
  • Time and Boundaries
    ↪ucarr
    I can't say because I reject your premise (for reasons I've already given) so the rest of the OP doesn't matter to me.
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Janus
    :up: :up:
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    ↪Wayfarer
    Not only TPFers but also according to that ontological mfer Martin Heidegger. :victory:
  • Time and Boundaries
    As I understand you, you're telling me cause and effect is not a temporal phenomenon. Am I reading you correctly? — ucarr
    Yeah; also that "time" is neither "temporal" nor a "phenomenon". (I think you're confusing (your) maps with the territory.)
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    Note that Heidegger singles out 'human beings', because they alone are able to encounter the question of 'what it means to be'. No other beings - particles and planets, ants and apes - are able to do this. To all intents, that is the same distinction I was seeking to make. — Wayfarer
    Yet Heidegger uses Dasein, not Sein, to distinguish 'humans' from 'mere beings' (i.e. Seiendes) as pointed out here
    ↪180 Proof
    on p. 2 of this thread. So unless you're disputing the very authority you have appealed to, Wayf, concede the point that the contemporary philosophical "distinction" is between Dasein and beings, n o t "beings and things". :roll:
  • Time and Boundaries
    Are you guys telling me time and cause and effect are either: a) separable; b) separate? — ucarr
    With respect to contemporary fundamental physics, I don't see what one has to do with the other. Even in Kant, these concepts are not directly related.
  • Thinking different
    Do you live in a very religious social environment? — bert1
    Not really. Due mostly to illness the last several months, I spend a lot of time with my mother at her place in a senior citizen community. She's devoutly Catholic and my younger brother and sis-in-law are quite "spiritual but not religious". All of my old friends live in different time zones and most have "aged into" religiosity and "virtue-signaling" suburbanity. FWIW, the Trappist "vow of silence" has always appealed to me. :halo:
  • Time and Boundaries
    ↪ucarr
    I don't see what "time" and "cause & effect" have to do with one another. IIRC, the equations of QFT lack time variables and those of GR, SR, etc are time-symmetric (suggesting a "block universe"), yet 'causal relationships' are described (or observed). Maybe I'm just missing the point of your post, ucarr.
  • How old is too young to die?
    Any age is too young. At no point is a person's potential exhausted. On the other hand people need to get out of the fucking way and die. — bert1
    :smirk:
  • The Dialectic of Atheism and Theism: An Agnostic's Perspective
    What matters is the fact that there is existence. Existence is not a property of things. Things are properties of existence. Existence is not a property of God. Existence is God. Existence is that which is. All contingent/created things are properties of existence and are made out of existence. — EnPassant
    Deus, sive Natura :up:
  • How old is too young to die?
    "Too young to die?"

    SIDS.

    Otherwise, any age is fair game since growing old – tomorrow – ain't promised to any living thing.

    :death: :flower:
  • The “Supernatural”
    ↪L'éléphant
    :up:

    ↪jgill
    :up:
  • Thinking different
    For me, the last decade or so I've been reflectively summing up a lifetime of study and peak experiences, hardships and beneficial failures. I'm still on the endless road, but these days looking back and forward simultaneously. Philosophy has been a whetstone for honing metacognitive skills, or "tools" as @T Clark says, which widen and deepen understanding (of misery, ignorance, unreality, conflict, dying), wherein, IME, 'knowing thy self-limits' is only a small, though disproportionately significant, part.

    I have become more culturally conservative (small "C") with age and yet less politically Conservative (not that I ever was so in my left-anarchist youth), just more careful, or as @BC says more personally "risk-adverse". I've always been both anti-auto(theo/pluto/techno)cratic and anti-utopian as I am today. (NB: Perhaps, though, I'm a touch millenarian in the form of 'the coming technology singularity'... ) Anyway, "woke" is a joke to me, though maybe a necessary (or zeitgeist) joke. I'm disgusted with the decadent, secondary fronts of "identity-politics" (particularly, though not exclusively, in the US) and social media-infantilizing trigger of reactive populisms "on both sides of the aisle" even among the marginally better educated and managed polities of the EU.

    Growing old is inevitable but it's abundantly clear growing-up – outgrowing childish "fears" & "hopes" (i.e. superstitions & faiths) is not. Well along in my 60th year, I find myself even more cognitively isolated from my peers (and family) than I'd felt in previous decades. C'est la vie. Aging and philosophy and some hard-won worldliness have made me more solitary and less lonely than I was in my 20s-30s. Bruises and scars can be good company. And books. No doubt many of us are here on TPF as a respite from the daily crucible of companionable silence and small talk (... with ourselves). Or just for kicks. :cool:

    I find that I value patience more than when young. — jgill
    :up:
  • The “Supernatural”
    ↪Tom Storm
    Nope. It seems to me supernatural is synonymous with necessaeily fictional (i.e. impossible).
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    ↪fdrake
    :up:

    ↪Jamal
    :100: Unfortunately, @Wayfarer seems acutely alleergic to contrary evidence.

    In philosophy I'd say 'things that exist = beings.' — bert1
    :up:
  • The “Supernatural”
    Supernatural: a phenomenon or entity beyond the laws of nature. — Art48
    I think "beyond" is too vague; more precisely, 'any X that contradicts, or is inconsistent with, the laws of nature' is what I understand by "supernatural".
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    It is an axiom of materialism that
    [ ... ]     — Wayfarer
    :roll:

    'Materiality' corresponds to embodied change and 'immateriality' (e.g. idealism) to disembodied change. Yes, the latter doesn't make sense and the former seems (too) reductive / mechanical. Nonetheless, insofar as there are 'subjectivities', at minimum they are material persons – embodied self-referential phenomenal systems – and not ghosts, Wayfarer. Speculations, or paradigms, which include ghosts (i.e. disembodied "minds") are more conceptually incoherent and inexplicable than – no matter how incomplete (e.g. eliminative) – those which do not. Nothing you have written here (or elsewhere) – not ad infinitum appeals to authority citations – persuasively challenges my preceding statement. A non-fallacious counterpoint in your own words, sir, would be a refreshing, and no doubt edifying, welcomed change in your m.o. :clap:
    ↪180 Proof
  • External world: skepticism, non-skeptical realism, or idealism? Poll
    ↪Janus
    Well done, and more or less my take on Kant's project as well. My question, apparently, wasn't clearly stated or precisely focused, but your precis gives me an opportunity to nail it down more concretely. Consider ...

    My thinking:

    IF Kant is an "empirical realist",

    and if "empirical" denotes how something is experienced or appears to us

    and if Kant's ding-an-sich, or "in itself", denotes reality,

    THEN, for the "empirical realist", appearances (i.e. "phenomena") are reality – or only aspects of reality;

    THEREFORE, "for us"-"in itself" is a distinction without a difference either epistemically or onticly.

    My re-question:

    Where does my thinking about (the implications of) Kant's "empirical realism" go wrong? :chin:
  • New Atheism
    ↪Tom Storm
    :pray: :lol:
  • New Atheism
    I spoke to an observant Jewish man once who told me he hated god and loved him in equal measures because life was so unfair and tragic. To me this just sounds like living with an abusive partner. — Tom Storm
    Also, isn't obeying "the command to love God" (by God!) akin to consensual rape or willing slavery? Toxic. :mask:
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    Of course. — Wayfarer
    So you can't even honestly reply without a wall of quoted texts to this poll
    ↪180 Proof
    . Pathetic. :shade:

    ↪Jamal
    :up:


    @universeness @ucarr
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Again I could care less about any of your propaganda.
    — NOS4A2

    The Senate Intelligence Committee findings, led by eight Republicans and seven Democrats. are not my "propaganda". The fact that the Trump Organization was found guilty of fraud is not my "propaganda". The grand jury's indictment recommendations in the Georgia investigation into election interference are not my "propaganda".     — Fooloso4
    :up: :up: :up:

    Just a guess, but I've always had a strong suspicion, based soley on his/her posts, that @NOS4A2 is someone who desperately needs to be lied to by FOX Noise, OANN, Newsmax, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Pravda (RT) and other wingnut media. :mask:

    Here's some more "propaganda" for NOS:
    Making
    Attorneys
    Get
    Attorneys

    :victory: :smirk:
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