I was once an observer in a room in which my friend having an intense and sustained conversation with an other who to my eyes and ears was not there — unenlightened

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

H. Mearns Antigonish

(couldn't resist) :cool:

Certainly. And as history shows it, we have no idea of them at the present. Only the future will define who is seen as a great person of the start of the 21st Century. — ssu

:up:

As a side note, my lucid dreaming self has limited consciousness compared to my waking self. — GrahamJ

Interesting. My experiences back in the 1970s were that my lucid dream self was more aware than my normal self. I felt myself pure will. The first instance was so powerful my first thought in that state was, "There is something else!"

I retired as a math prof 24 years ago, so practices may have changed. No one in the department used the internet as a substitute for a required text, although those texts cost a great deal. Of course, the WWW was fledgling.

I once experimented using Schaum's Outline in my complex variables course, partly to reduce the cost of the course text from $80 to $18, but also to provide an easy source of facts to accompany my lectures. Mixed results. When students missed class they had to consult with a fellow classmate to get notes or visit my office. Others appreciated the easy access to basic facts and examples.

For a professional these days research depends greatly on one's ability to access preprints in one's area. Books are still useful for grad coursework, but beyond that it's keeping in contact with peers and using the internet to try to stay abreast in one's discipline.

Having said that, in my old age I frequently go to my library and pick out a text published 60 years ago to refresh my dwindling memories.

Constructivism (and my position in the OP) does not deny that objects exist independent of perception. The key point is that our knowledge of such objects is mediated by subjective processes—experience and prior knowledge shape how those objects appear to us. This does not negate their independent existence but highlights the active role of the subject in any knowledge of them. — Wayfarer

I agree. My adventures with the Art of Dreaming were across the spectrum from elemental lucidity to a strong reality, an awareness, more pronounced and sharp than anything I have ever witnessed in normal everyday experience. Here is where degrees of reality has a possible measure. I's unfortunate that achieving these states is so happenstance. For me it was like a second nature.

One of Stephen King's novels has a brilliant description of the central character awakening in a field and smelling growing onions and freshly overturned earth a mile away.

Math and philosophy overlap. I asked the AI a question about a math topic that is somewhat unique, the question being how would it suggest I move ahead. The reply was sophisticated and correct and it was something I had given little thought to. This may be an instance of original thinking arising out of Copilot.

Although it is possible a mathematician somewhere on the internet has suggested this, I doubt it since it pertains to a topic of which I am one of the few professionals having an interest. Perhaps the only authority.

I am keeping an open mind. Fascinating.

At that moment, I had a sudden and inexplicable realisation of the foundational nature of the 'I'. Not myself, as a particular individual, but THE self, the 'I AM' for whom the world exists, without which there is no existence. It suddenly became clear to me that this 'I am' is foundational to reality. — Wayfarer

The AofD experiences I had 40 or so years ago were astounding in several ways, the most pronounced being a wakening into a world more vivid and "real" than normal. As I mentioned I felt I was pure will, but the colors and definitions seemed stronger also. One experience was awakening in a bright desert staring at a large extremely colorful cactus. I moved around it and saw into it from several positions, astounded at the sharpness of definition and brilliancy.

A couple of years ago I suddenly awoke into a world where I was a different person, living in an Irish cottage, looking out a window at a countryside. For a brief few moments I had the sensations, memories and feelings of someone else. Another ineffable encounter with an alternate reality. It was quickly over.

I can't explain why these things happened to me so easily. I was a mathematician and an experienced rock climber - which are not so disjoint as you might suspect.

The "I AM" is the pure will behind the shadows of ourselves.

Thank you for your accounts of personal experiences. I will comment on each over the next day or so.

You are the closest to my mystical adventures. After reading the Art of D, which was brought to my attention by a young fellow rock climber who enjoyed a drug or two, I made the attempt to see my hands, as you did, but instantly I was shifted to an alternate reality - or so it seemed. Stunned, I lay there for a minute or so then got out of bed and walked across the bedroom floor to a closed door, feeling the carpet under my feet and stroking a chest of drawers on the way. I had heard of people walking through closed doors so I gave it a try and it was like going through a thin layer of fog. On the other side a stairwell led down to the living room, and as I started down I was pulled back to normal reality. Later I learned that moving down in that state can result in losing it.

Other adventures followed, and in each I was fully conscious but enabled to violate the laws of physics. How would I describe it in a few words? I was pure will.

already on to a different girl man; the teacher is old news. This other one does in fact like the beach she said, so it might work out super chill. Who knows though — Zolenskify

:up:

What would you like to write/read about? — Amity

Personal experiences relating to philosophical/mystical subjects. Not ramblings about dead philosophers. (My apologies to TPF members) :gasp:

I practiced meditative exercises 60 years ago, thanks to Alan Watts and others and the "Zen Boom", along with existentialism. Then later followed Castaneda's Art of Dreaming instructions with amazing results altering my understandings of reality.

If it is about personal experience, what form of philosophical writing do you think would be best? — Amity

Personal narratives and philosophical speculations thereof. Don't write about Zen unless you are or have been a practitioner, e.g.

(In general, don't write about technical subjects, like QM, unless you have some expertise.)

Spirituality: Secular or Religious? — Amity

Well written details of personal experiences rather than philosophical ramblings should have priority.

Back to the OP momentarily, I think a spectrum of reality is a better approach then degrees of reality, the latter implying a sort of ranking.

Eastern mystical practices, like Zen, revolve about experiences of enlightenment rather than philosophical discussions. Although enlightenment may be ineffable, it would help if more responses on the site were about personal experiences than speculations and searching out what the Greek ancients had to say. I realize this goes against the grain of this site, and that also there may be very few instances of personal revelations, but the discussion is getting nowhere with regard to its title. However, if this is OK with the few participants, and digressions are acceptable, I stand down and watch. Just my opinion.

A professor is not a teacher? I assume you mean pre-college instructor. — jgill

Who said anything about a "pre-college instructor"?
Please, clear the air for me if I offended you. — Zolenskify

. . . is it moral to get with a teacher versus an actual professor? — Zolenskify

No offense. Sorry if I mistook a serious OP for a bit of humor.

and the question always to ask 4) What could possibly go wrong. — T Clark

:chin:

A triangle with interior angles of 180/0/0 would be a degenerate triangle. It allows you to say that any three points in a plane determine a triangle instead of saying that any three non-colinear points do. Mathematicians are generally pleased when they don't have to make special rules to cover edge cases. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmmm . . . so the common triangle is a non-degenerate triangle. I doubt I ever used the expression, "degenerate". But I see it's popular on Wikipedia.

However, I've always liked the expression "indifferent fixed point". Rather than "neutral fixed point".

Who would have thought the ridiculous expression A -> -A would go for one K posts?

In that case, my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. Maybe that can be done, but at face value it is implausible. Unless there are only two degrees — Leontiskos

True enough. But I wonder if some of the oddities coming out of quantum theory might lie in that nebulous zone between the two extremes. My thoughts range from virtual incredulity at action at a distance to speculating that somehow mathematics materializes in a strange way.

Which brings up a question. How is logic related to definitions of reality?

is it moral to get with a teacher versus an actual professor? — Zolenskify

A professor is not a teacher? I assume you mean pre-college instructor.

Sorry, but this thread is a joke. Have a chuckle and move on.

I recommend a length requirement, say one page. And how do you deal with AI? Perhaps open it up to AI with each participant asking for a short essay on a particular uniform subject, but in different ways. For example, one asks for an essay "on the nature of being" and another asking "what is being". That way the contest reduces to the cleverness of the request. Just a thought. :smile:

I do really like the idea of trying to come up with a continuous graduation reality concept, which isn't an accuracy of a representation, or a way of counting things that already apply, or a way of saying how individuated an entity is. But I don't think it's possible, honestly. — fdrake

We need a metric space whose points are things that are real. Then a distance function for pairs of points. But first, one needs to decide what "real" means. I suggest anything our consciousness registers, from the moon to flights of fancy. But where the purely physical runs up against the purely mental could be a problem worth a thousand pages of philosophical ramblings.

they're just zooted. — fdrake

Thanks. Another new word for me.

I'll go one step further. A deeper question is whether the spectrum of reality is continuous. As Einstein inferred, the moon exists - and our imaginations exist. What is in between?

If you say that logic is not merely symbol manipulation, then what do you say it is? — Leontiskos

It's mathematics without the math. :roll:

the paradox of your notes is that whereas the figure collapses uniformly, the surface areas of the 3D figures are limitless. — javi2541997

:up:

I think this recent move by the US to allow Ukraine to use US arms to strike targets deep inside Russia blatantly shows their escalatory intentions. — Tzeentch

11,000 to 100,000 North Korean soldiers muddies the political waters. These special ops troops infiltrate and assassinate.

Nevertheless, this madness must end at the negotiation table.

Depends on what "get with" means. After my first divorce one of my mature students showed up on the front row with an apple on her desk. Later that day she popped into my office. I asked "Where is my apple?". She said, "I ate it". We were happily married for 33 years.

For example, I am not an expert on mathematics, but some paradoxes are interesting, and I want to expand my knowledge of that — javi2541997

Here is a brief note with images on the diagonal paradox, which some on this site argue is not really a paradox. Interestingly, a physicist on this site mentioned it might have relevance in describing or explaining quantum phenomena.

. . . or that contemporary philosophers in general are not interested in mankind’s search for meaning? — Joshs

Perhaps that task has been relocated in psychology and psychiatry. Or where its been for eons, religion.

What I mean about the difficulty of contemporary analytic philosophy, is that it's often extremely dense, written by and for those who can draw on a great deal of specialised scholarship — Wayfarer

Certainly in logic and foundations of mathematics this is true. "Clarity of thought", as Wikipedia states, may arise from the use of well defined symbols and operations thereupon rather than poorly defined words.

If I were a professor, I would evaluate more the grammar than the content itself. Maybe a student is great in math, but if his grammar is terrible, I think he should not be able to promote. Simple. — javi2541997

Where I taught we went through a gentler version of this, grading partly on grammar. But trying to teach both subjects simultaneously was counter productive. And I am not sure the ability to write lengthy pieces with delightful descriptive flourishes is an admirable trait where succinct, to the point passages would suffice - in fact, be more readable. For example, many long convoluted posts made on this site.

because on many philosophical views the goal of a philosophy teacher is not going to be publication, but teaching (really more mentoring), which of course certainly happens, but in academia there is the whole "publish or perish" thing that can often backload this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We had a small anthropology/philosophy department where I taught. Actually, if I recall, one or two philosophers.

In the larger universities, especially in the sciences, the reason the institutions put pressure on faculty is to get grants that, for instance, release the member from teaching to do research and procure more grants, with the school sharing the incoming money. I see there are several large grants available to philosophical studies, including theology. But probably little coming from the department of defense where the big bucks reside. Correct me if I am wrong.

So Publish or Parish while enhancing an institution's reputation has a stronger motive.

Frankly, I am surprised there are as many grants for philosophy as there are.

I don't see why it needs such a presupposition. Humans have found that nature is intelligible. — Janus

Interesting. Does nature include quantum mechanics and consciousness? — Tom Storm

Give it time and it might explain these phenomena.

Elementary calculus does not require "actual" infinities. — jgill

Calculus uses infinite sets on day one. Even before a student gets to calculus, with analytical geometry we're using infinite sets. The real line and the real plane are infinite sets.

But it seems you mean that calculus doesn't usually mention transfinite ordinals (though the set of natural numbers is a transfinite ordinal), which is true. — TonesInDeepFreeze

That's what I meant. To think of infinity itself as some sort of number. Trying to keep the discussion at an amateur level.

I have used R, but not a transfinite number. Unless I occasionally use the "point at infinity" in complex analysis. — jgill

Points at infinity are not required to be transfinite numbers. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I'm thankful for that. Why resurrect this dead thread?

If there is an air of insubstantiality about this thread, it is because it is concerned with the philosophy of philosophy. This makes it particularly liable to disappear up its own fundament.

Accordingly, I propose, firstly, that philosophy is always parasitic; one might try a 'philosophy of nothing', but it wouldn't get very far. Rather, one first starts to talk or write about something and at some later stage, one starts to examine the verbiage philosophically. as philosophy of religion, or knowledge, or psychology or whatever. — unenlightened

As disciplines go, it is by far the wordiest, in inverse proportion to its effectiveness perhaps.

If possible, (ideally sic) the best foundation is bedrock, If one has reached bedrock, as Wittgenstein would have it, one has reached the end of that portion of philosophy, the questions are resolved or dissolved, and the superstructure is as sound as it can be.

By contrast, spiritual talk is untethered, lighter than air and floats higher and higher until it reaches such height that it attains outer space, where there is no longer any up or down, and no one can hear you pontificate. — unenlightened

Some philosophers don't know when to stop. A millennium and a half ago the bedrock was sighted and reached in some aspects.

I think of category theory when I read this. It seems to hover over the roughly 30,000 mathematical topics (on Wiki) on angelic wings. A principle component of modern mathematics.

Is there a "modern philosophy", and, if there is, what are its principle components? From Wiki:

Modern philosophy is philosophy developed in the modern era and associated with modernity

:roll:

Great post @unenlightened :up:

I was thinking that the tradition of the "top-level" idea casts philosophy as specifically "the queen of the sciences" — Srap Tasmaner

Refuting Gauss, who termed mathematics as that. Also in medieval terms, theology.

What philosophical notions illuminating the mysteries of QM have been proposed by non-scientist philosophers? Just curious.

Set theory is needed for the rest of math and so is logic — Srap Tasmaner

Much of classical math existed before the introduction of set theory. So, no. Modern math is another thing.

But here I would question whether the notion of cause adds anything that is not already given in the mechanistic description. — SophistiCat

You are correct. It's a mere mathematical simulation of cause and effect. The philosophical notions are out of my league. But it is a fascinating subject.

You seem to want to dilute the concept so as to include just about any kind of mechanistic analysis, which is tantamount to eliminating causation — SophistiCat

Why should this be the case? I drop an object from a certain height and predict when it will hit the ground. How does this eliminate causality? There are a host of factors involved in this physical feat, and one can argue one's way through that jungle, rather than citing a principle cause, gravity.

(I wrote a math note a year or so ago that partitioned a causal chain temporally so that each link was formed by a collection of contributory causal effects added together to produce one complex number associated with that link. Just a mathematical diversion, but a vacation from the plethora of philosophical commentaries about the subject.)

Which is, again, quite cromulent. — fdrake

Thank you. I just learned a new word. :chin:

But how is that "checking the validity of one argument using another"? — TonesInDeepFreeze

Sorry. Wrong @Hanover post.

I don't know what you mean. Example? — TonesInDeepFreeze

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction — Hanover

Not sure how this fits in with the OP. I've used this approach from time to time, but never to the extent of assuming ~P is true and showing P follows. Usually one shows a logical contradiction of sorts short of P being true. But I digress from the conversation, which has long ago become absurd. @Tones clarified the issue way back imo.