Revolutionary.

I think the only way you can fly that is by involving the circadian rhythm and our liking for a blue sky.

I understand the story of "orange" is a whimsical irony.

Just like people.

Oh gosh, this just reminded me of a great video involving color.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

Sorry for YouTube but this illustrates precisely what I mean to say. I can clarify using mythology if you like.

Spinoza is cool but his system is not open to criticism. It was too well done.

I don't think they're serious. Interesting perspective, though. Specifically the last line.

You both worry me. Please be kind to yourselves.

Thanks I never knew the Black Sea was an ocean.

We have more trade with Taiwan than Romania. — Chester

This made me laugh a little because Romania doesn't have a single ocean port.

I lost awareness of my body and experienced a feeling of timelessness, inner peace and omniscience — Tzeentch

I have had experiences like that too. They are so difficult to share through language. — Punshhh

This may be slightly off-topic, but I wonder if these experiences can be described as a combination of pronoia and derealization. To understand each other we surely must grasp something somewhere.

Thanks for the elaboration. I do appreciate where you're coming from, and I broadly agree. For example, I understand MRI imaging identities regional brain activity even in unconscious patients, which is irrefutably neurological, and that this phenomenon isn't necessarily limited to visual areas. But I can't help but observe the incommensurability of neuroscience and psychology. Isn't it rather annoying?

From a psychosocial angle, which is one I'm more comfortable with, it goes without saying that translating from one language to another throws up weird artifacts of meaning. For example, the Ancient Greek ἀντίστροφος, counterpart, literally means twisted together, which I traced back to originating in ordinary rope. Clearly vocabulary binds fluent speakers to a certain scheme, as your Korean example alludes to.

All I know for sure is that I'm pedantic about language. I'll try to make that as tolerable as possible.

I'd like to stay on track. Is it "neural priming" or just "priming"? Because I'm afraid the neural part may be quite fatal. Neuroscience can't examine mental contents, which was the focus of this topic. Apparently we can have things like neural dynamics, neural processing and neural correlates (etc), in addition to attentional priming, semantic priming and relational priming (etc).. but as far as I can tell it would be misleading to imply neurological phenomena fit onto behavioral phenomena with a single term.

If it refers to neurons in an ordinary, biological kind of way then this is also potentially confusing since the neurons are kind of implied, no? The role of neurons in mental contents as opposed to.. not-neurons?

While launching as few tangents as possible, those were my thoughts when I suspected it was inapplicable. I'm also not sure how Gazzaniga's work fits into that but I understand why he's mentioned.

I took this to be a topic about the role of language in belief and on the nature of mental contents, which is a highly speculative thing, but any connection to neural priming, assuming such a thing exists, strikes me as indistinct, if not nakedly conjectural. So.. your persistence is answered but no grouchiness is intended!

Sorry. I was flippant about atoms having minds. But a mind is something which has mental states and mental contents, no? Where, or rather how, do we draw the line between the environment and ourselves?

I'm comfortable with sweeping this aside and assuming we're extremely weird biological computers who are somehow puzzled by our ability to do our job and who think we can compare ourselves to a non-self.

That's fine. My only problem with panpsychism is that it's virtually indistinguishable from animism.

Perhaps it would be best to assume we're all mindless zombies before we assume atoms have minds?

Panpsychism isn't neutral monism. Russell had in mind a third ingredient in addition to mind and matter.

There's nothing special about neutral monism which is why it's neutral and unknowable.

I have a horse. You got a cart? :]

We're certainly not invisible. We're just.. an island.

An observer's position at the center of the universe isn't substantiated by the CMB or quasars, no.

Wherever you look from is as good as the center, and if you care for details, it's self-substantiating.

I think the flaw here is assuming the universe is spherical like the earth, which it very probably isn't.

Beyond the surface of the "sphere" is unknown and unknowable. It can never be known. Sorry.

I'll translate. Look for the base of all knowledge with humor, since you'll never find the ultimate reason. Look for the knowledge which fits into other knowledge with some humor, since convenience is not always truth. And since the practical reigns supreme, try to go with the flow and view things for their utility as a rolling stone who believes nothing is absolutely certain outside of the rolling stone.

Make sense?

Lol, yeah. I just thought it was funny how the first reference I found was.. absurdly unhelpful, but that's not anyone's fault. That you focus on an exalted state is interesting and reminds me of Plotinus.

I became [..] a lot humble and embracing uncertainty and scepticism, I don't want to believe something too much and repeat it all over again, plus it's only rational to be uncertain. — I-wonder

Maybe this is the issue. A dash of coherentism, a drop of foundationalism, and some pragmatism, too.

Add some nihilistic egoism Tao-style utilitarianism, and voila, you've made a something. Delicious!

How? I don't know, dude. Comedy and cuteness. We do a trial-run of losing our life with sleep, no?

If it helps, the sum of information comprising a life will outlast the duration of that life. Potentially forever.

Mysticism: A term used to cover a literally bewildering variety of states of mind. Perhaps the most useful definition is that given by Jean Gerson: "Theologia mystica est experimentalis cognitio habita de Deo per amoris unitivi complexum" (Mystical theology is knowledge of God by experience, arrived at through the embrace of unifying love). Three points to notice: (1) the use of the term mystical theology (which was traditional in the Church until comparatively modern times) associates the mystical state with, while distinguishing it from, natural theology, which enables man to arrive at some knowledge of God by natural reason: also from dogmatic theology, which treats of the knowledge of God arrived at by revelation. (2) We do come to know God through mystical theology. (3) This knowledge is obtained not by intellectual processes but by the more direct experience implied in the term "unifying love." — New Catholic Encyclopedia, T. Corbishley, J. E. Biechler

Well, that clears everything up..

I don't know. How seriously a given person connects words and concepts is probably highly variable.

I think this is a question which psycholinguistics is set to tackle if you value psychology's opinion. I know studies exist where language has been demonstrated to affect the formation of certain beliefs. Actually, that's kind of what rhetoric is supposed to be about, and that's been knocking around since ancient times.

If it's not personal variance, then it could be domain-related variance, as in a domain of knowledge and the vocabulary orbiting that knowledge. For example, it could be the case that people familiar with Catholic vocabulary are somehow more inclined to see things through a (Trinity-inspired) 3-sided logic.

(And for the record.. I don't see how neural priming phenomena are applicable here.)

What do people do in a world where systems design and maintain themselves, though?

On a related note, will new technology make something like this a necessity at some point, I wonder?

Yes. Soft science. Technically, and in view of demarcation, social science; linguistics.

To give some scope, code cracking is about mathematics, etymology is anthropomorphic. They're similar.

For example, Latine implicat totum. Latin ties all. The middle word is root for implication, the last total.

When you have words like this, the evidence is made of letters, like an equation. It's not speculative.

As long as people fear the unknown it may be possible to ground this as a linear question of survival.

If 200-1000 words is ~1000-5000 characters then I think that's about perfect.

The only other thing I can think of is that theme words may need to have a minimum syllable complexity.

I have a secular take on the notion of an afterlife which happily bends the rules of its accepted meaning.

Every action a person takes in their life irreversibly changes the informational configuration of the universe with consequences which are presumed to have a permanent physical effect until the end of time. The physical link is due to the way information can only change from one state to another at the cost of some finite quantity of energy. A most exaggerated example is the way we still discuss the works of dead philosophers; from the perspective of the infosphere they're neither prelife nor afterlife. This certainly also applies to ordinary people but is much harder to illustrate. Surreal but not supernatural.

By the above account an afterlife can be demythologized into a intergenerational reservoir of information. If this is begging the question, it may suit our purposes to merely define information as a medium of exchange for now, which, at least for most of us, is constantly demonstrated by digital technology.

Library destruction was routine. It could've been burned, partly or entirely, on more than one occasion.

Neglect is also possible. What happened will likely never be known because there's no existing evidence.

So we're potentially psychoanalyzing a non-person over a ~1700 year gap..

so they say, its generally true that the water wont jump out the glass — ernestm

I'm really not sure if "scientific" is an appropriate label for your work or not.

big-picture philosophy-as-a-whole thing that my interest is all about. — Pfhorrest

Could the "all categories" page on PhilPapers count? Because that's basically my answer.

science does not attempt to 'prove' a hypothesis about the material world. There are mathematical proofs, in the form of tautologies, but in scientific research, a hypothesis can only be corroborated, never proven. — ernestm

I thought scientific proofs turn hypotheses into theories. And do tautologies offer anything meaningful?

His definition seems a little vague because it potentially applies to an inexplicably special anything. An anthropologist would likely emphasize some kind of ritual aspect because it's slightly more quantitative.

If "nothing matters" is both liberating and depressing then surely it's a question of perspective.

May I ask, what's your view of mathematics? Do you think it has adequate descriptive power? When you talk about the possibility of interlevel relations in science, I can only imagine such a translation in mathematical terms. Otherwise you're churning two gears together without lubricant. Oh, the horror!

Trust is a universal force analogous to gravity. — unenlightened

Highly speculative but deliciously quotable.

Work is why systems exist. But this scenario is necessarily communist, as stipulated.

It just occurred to me the reasoning behind this topic is virtually identical to moral realism.

Where's the "nes" option?