I started this project because, I tried using chat GPT to discuss philosophy, and while helpful in its breadth of knowledge, I often found it overly "yes-man" like, and unwilling to engage me head on in any rigorous fashion. It just wasn't the same as discussing philosophy with a person. — 013zen

There are some metaphysical issues I've been thinking about. As part of that thinking, I made a list of metaphysical statements that seemed related and important to me, although I couldn't easily put into words how they were related. After thinking about them for a while, I punched them into Chat GPT and Gemini to see if that would give me anything to work with. The results I got were helpful. I went back and forth with the programs for a while to focus it's responses better. Since then, I've been using the results to focus my own understanding and come to my own conclusions.

I plan to use the results of this work soon in a thread. I'll acknowledge AI's use, but the words and thoughts I use will be my own. I really don't have much of an opinion about AI use for more intensive and extensive philosophical work. I suggest you look at threads from @Pierre-Normand. He's put a lot of effort into this.

With that being said, one of the frustrations I've found with discussing philosophy, even with my close friends, is the sheer inability to remove oneself from one's own position. We are always responding in a manner that's a defense of our own position. — 013zen

But that's the whole point of discussing philosophy for me - to put your ideas out on the table for dissection. That's how you test them. That's how you find out how well you really understand your positions. It is a gift to have conscientious, intelligent friends who will try to rip your ideas apart. I didn't really use AI for that purpose in what I did. I used it more for synthesis than for analysis.

So, I wondered, what if A.I. could be both knowledgeable, and rigorous while not entrenched in any position - just there to reflect alongside you - not, as a replacement for engaging philosophically with others, but as a tool to help us reflect on our own positions more deeply, without getting bogged down in particular positions. — 013zen

At some level, that's what I did with my ideas, although I think you are probably talking about a more extensive effort than I used. As I see it, philosophy isn't about getting answers, it's about developing, expanding, and testing your own thoughts and understanding. Reading other philosophers, or using AI I suppose, can help with that, but it's work you have to do yourself.

To any who would like to provide direct feedback to the project - let me know, — 013zen

I'd be curious to take a look, but I'm not sure I'll give you the amount of feedback you seem to be looking for.

For me, the forum is a community. I come here to hang around with you guys. Some of you I consider friends, most of you neighbors, and a few nemeses. We all share an interest in thinking, and thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking. I come here to have my ideas tested. Sure there’s a bunch of crap, but nobody requires that I participate in it.

What a mean post. I like it.

you’ve excluded that entire scope from consideration.
— T Clark

My point wasn’t to make a graph about how creativity changed over time in philosophy. — Skalidris

My quote referenced the fact that you've excluded science, which until 1600 or so was part of philosophy, from your evaluation.

I didn’t even mention a specific period of time in the past, I was just talking about the biggest names in philosophy, who gave rise to new disciplines – at any point in the past, it’s funny you directly jumped to the conclusion that I meant 5000 years ago. — Skalidris

Not funny at all. You wrote:

However, groundbreaking philosophers had such creative ideas that transformed the way we see the world, and even gave rise to new disciplines we now see as essential. So what became so wrong about generating new ideas that challenge the status quo? Why isn’t philosophy about that anymore? — Skalidris

You didn't specify when you were talking about. I didn't specify 5,000 years ago. Perhaps you misunderstood. I was talking about the entire last 5,000 years. Philosophy has been around for thousands of years. The "biggest names in philosophy" do go back thousands of years.

Just because the press is a victim of the same phenomenon doesn’t mean they don’t have a point. — Joshs

I am skeptical, both of the press and what we are calling the decline of the arts. I just look around and see thousands of high quality books, movies, television shows, and popular music produced every year. I can't speak for visual arts. Is there a lot of crap, of course. But you don't have to read, watch, listen to, or look at it. We also have easy access to everything ever produced throughout history. There is more high quality literature, history, philosophy, art, music... than any of us could go through in a life time.

Wringing one's hands and crying "hell in a handbasket" is not evidence.

judging by the popular press — Joshs

The irony being that the popular press itself is among the most decadent and stagnated institutions. It makes it hard to take it seriously.

However, groundbreaking philosophers had such creative ideas that transformed the way we see the world, and even gave rise to new disciplines we now see as essential. So what became so wrong about generating new ideas that challenge the status quo? Why isn’t philosophy about that anymore? — Skalidris

It’s not clear to me that your criticism is correct. You’ve cherry picked accomplishments from 5000 years and compared them to just a few years now. It’s also true that up until around the 1500s philosophy and science were inseparable. Now you’ve excluded that entire scope from consideration.

I don’t know enough philosophy to refute your claim, but you certainly haven’t provided any evidence that it’s true.

A hypothesis doesn't claim to be testable as it's just an idea. — Quk

I went and checked and you’re right. An hypothesis can be a metaphysical statement or a scientific one. A scientific hypothesis does need to be testable.

What's the reason you think your hypothesis is true? — Quk

It’s not a hypothesis, there is no empirical test that could be performed that would verify or falsify it.

Why not start with the premise that the world is pretty much just as it seems to be, — Banno

The world pretty much seems to have an “in here” and “out there.”

As I noted, I'm repeating myself and we're not getting any closer to a common understanding. I have nothing new to add.

Then we agree that animals think and behave logically given the way they are designed and the sensory information they receive as inputs, — Harry Hindu

It seems to me, although I am not certain, that logic requires higher mind functions and perhaps self-awareness. I'd say rather that animals think and behave effectively.

just as I explained with my example with the moth. — Harry Hindu

Many animals have much more complex and intelligent behaviors than that. I think, although again I don't have specific knowledge, moths aren't attracted to the moon but to a bright light against a dark background. This is, I assume, a genetically encoded instinct and is not learned. That's not logic or even logical.

humans are exponentially more complex in the way they perceive and behave in the world than the other animals. — Harry Hindu

This is just not true.

Name an animal that can shape the landscape without a brain, or that when shaping the landscape they are not using their senses and brain. — Harry Hindu

It's clear, at least to me, that organisms without brains have had a much greater impact on the environment than those with them. This is from Wikipedia:

The Great Oxidation Event (GOE) or Great Oxygenation Event, also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Revolution, Oxygen Crisis or Oxygen Holocaust, was a time interval during the Earth's Paleoproterozoic era when the Earth's atmosphere and shallow seas first experienced a rise in the concentration of free oxygen. This began approximately 2.460–2.426 billion years ago (Ga) during the Siderian period and ended approximately 2.060 Ga ago during the Rhyacian. Geological, isotopic and chemical evidence suggests that biologically produced molecular oxygen (dioxygen or O2) started to accumulate in the Archean prebiotic atmosphere due to microbial photosynthesis, and eventually changed it from a weakly reducing atmosphere practically devoid of oxygen into an oxidizing one containing abundant free oxygen, with oxygen levels being as high as 10% of modern atmospheric level by the end of the GOE...

...The oxidative environmental change, compounded by a global glaciation, devastated the microbial mats around the Earth's surface. The subsequent adaptation of surviving archaea via symbiogenesis with aerobic proteobacteria (which went endosymbiont and became mitochondria) may have led to the rise of eukaryotic organisms and the subsequent evolution of multicellular life-forms. — Wikipedia - Great Oxidation Event

It's clear to me you and I are not going to come to any common understanding on this issue. I've already started repeating myself. Let's leave it at that.

it's useful for what? Constructing a metaphysics? — Banno

No. As I’ve said previously in this thread, it’s useful to be able to know the difference between a rock and the pain you feel when you drop it on your toe.

What's that, then? — Banno

Because it’s a useful distinction.

There is no such thing as truth. The best we can do is come to an agreement and call that "the truth". In actuality it's more like a placeholder, like a suspended version of truth. — Kurt

I didn’t say there was no such thing as truth, I said metaphysical statements are not true or false.

Why presume a difference between "in here" and "out there"? — Banno

For the same reason we presume a difference between dogs and cats.

I agree that there is a myriad of perspectives that we can take. I want to examine what these perspectives tell us not only about reality, but also about what false beliefs we have adopted in order to make sense of the world. I want to investigate how much bagage we can shed, before we get lost or loose ourselves. And whatever the case might be, so far it looks like most of what we believe is simply a fairy tale. — Kurt

Metaphysics is the one philosophical subject that means the most to me. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and have written about it on the forum too many times. I have a canned lecture - T Clark Explains Metaphysics. It goes like this - Yada, yada, yada - metaphysical statements are not true or false, they have no truth value - yada, yada, yada - R.G. Collingwood - yada, yada, yada - most disagreements here on the forum are caused by people not recognizing the difference between metaphysics and science - yada, yada, yada.

The perspectives we take don't tell us anything about reality - they create reality. Define it. Are hallucinations real? Well, maybe a hallucinated elephant isn't a real elephant, but it's a real hallucination. And, yes, everything we believe is a story, but it's not a fairy tale. Some stories are true, or at least useful.

Now this is a problem, disguised as a party trick. When we talk about matter, we talk about something substancial. Yet, what you do here is defining matter as being completely described by the characteristic of mass. A characteristic is just a number with some corelations to other numbers (characteristics). So the whole concept of substancialtity gets lost in the process. — Kurt

I put this in specifically to make my point about the difference between metaphysics and science. Science deals with things you can observe, measure, calculate e.g. matter. Scientific statements can be true or false. Metaphysics deals with things that can't be evaluated empirically. Metaphysical statements can't be true or false.

The exterior reality has to be itself an expression of something even more fundamental. As far as I can understand, that something is the principle of the laws of nature and the natural order. — Kurt

Laws of nature are just as much stories as everything else. Actually - more so.

Welcome to the forum, although I see you've been around for a while. This is a really good OP, although it's scope is too big for me to respond to it effectively. You've basically summarized all of metaphysics in one long post. Still, a couple of thoughts.

"What is real?" is a metaphysical question. It doesn't have a correct answer. Is the quantum wave function real? Of course it is. Of course it isn't. It all depends on where we stand, what perspective we take and that depends on the problem we are trying to solve.

What is matter? Matter is something that has the characteristic of mass. When you apply a force to something with mass, it accelerates. That's how you can tell.

All you need to do is make some basic observations of animal behavior to realize that this is not true. To say that other animals are "just as" humans simply does not fit our observations. Humans are obviously capable of much more complex behaviors than other animals. — Harry Hindu

I guess I confused things when I wrote "just as much." I didn't mean sentient animal's minds and behaviors are as complex as human's. I meant their minds, their intelligence, are just as big a part of their nature. Animals are capable of using their minds to make images, remember, communicate, create abstractions, and solve problems, obviously, some more than others.

Has any of these organism made it into space using their own (brain) power? — Harry Hindu

You, or rather Jacob Brownoski, wrote "he is not a figure in the landscape—he is a shaper of the landscape." I responded that animals shape the landscape too, some with their brains some not. What does that have to do with going to the moon?

Intellect in the older faculty psychology refers specifically to the understanding of universals, of form. It's not the same thing as memory or what gets called the estimate/cogitative power that allows for problem solving and inductive pattern recognition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're right. I used the wrong word. I should have said "intelligence" instead of "intellect," although you might not like that any better. In a book I like very much, "Feeling & Knowing," Antonio Damasio discusses how intelligence and knowledge manifest in organisms up and down the phyletic scale. He uses language that is different from what we are using here and I can't think of an easy way to make his points simply and briefly, so I'm going to leave it at that for now.

Absolutely. Every brain owner is curious. Humans are not the only brain owners. Curiosity is the motor of brain development. No curiosity, no brain. — Quk

Yes.

↪T Clark I think it leads to a more robust questioning of science and reason than many of us would accept. I’m not convinced Lorenz aligns with enactivism and this approach would probably question the realism and evolutionary biology that underpins Lorenz’s work. — Tom Storm

Did I mention that I don’t get it?

There is a sort of anthropological/metaphysical question of if animals can "know" as in, intellection, but obviously they can know in different ways, e.g. "sense knowledge," memory, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I understand it, there is no controversy about the fact that sentient non-human animals can learn from experience and act based on that learning. How is that not knowledge? Just because they can’t put it into words doesn't mean they can’t use it in effective, and perhaps even self-aware, ways in their everyday lives. Perhaps our differences only reflect a difference in our understanding of the definitions of “knowledge” and “intellect.”

Personally, I would argue that science is itself a form of metaphysics, or at the very least, it rests upon one: — Tom Storm

That is exactly what Collingwood was saying - not that science is metaphysics, but that metaphysics provides the foundation for science.

But the implication of Joshs contribution asks us what exactly is it that is intelligible and what are we understanding? — Tom Storm

I’ll say it again, and then leave it alone. I just don’t get it. I don’t see what the big deal is about the fact that living organisms and the environment co-evolve. Of course they do. I guess what annoyed me about Josh’s statement is that it claims somehow Lorenz missed that. Of course he didn’t, it just isn’t particularly relevant to the specific issue he was discussing.

I guess this asks us whether perception is simply a picture of an external world or a process that helps create reality through interaction. — Tom Storm

To start, it’s important to realize that Lorenz wasn’t talking about perception alone, he was talking about our entire cognitive system - not just our eyes and ears and nose, but our brains and nerves, our thoughts, our consciousness, our emotions.

If you go back to the original Lorenz quote I posted, he definitely thinks that the world represented in our minds is real. I don’t necessarily agree with him. Deciding what is real and what’s not is a metaphysical process, not a scientific one.

Joshs would you mind having a go at explaining this further? This idea appeals to me, as it goes to the heart of what we think we are and I’d like a more educated formulation of it than the slight understanding I currently have. — Tom Storm

For the record, I wasn’t really arguing against @Joshs point - only that it isn’t clear to me how it is relevant to this specific issue.

men by nature desire to know — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you think non-human sentient animals don’t also desire to know? Some of them certainly do.

it's not clear what "aboutness" anyone is talking about. Are we talking about metaphysics? Language? Evolutionary origins of cognitive faculties? Developmental psychology? It all kind of gets mixed together. — SophistiCat

This is not an uncommon problem here on the forum, and I assume in philosophy in general. In this case in particular, we’re not talking metaphysics or language. We’re talking about the facts of how human cognition and evolutionactually work.

I would prefer that you provide links to those other things because the language used in your quote is unwieldy. — Harry Hindu

The quote seems clear and fully wieldy to me. I don't know of any other source who expresses it's point as well as it does.

Instincts are useful or else they would not have been selected. They are like a general purpose tool for handling a variety of situations or situations that rarely change. Conscious behavior allows an organism to adapt one's behavior in real-time in dynamic environments. This is why humans have been able to spread into all sorts of environments, including space. — Harry Hindu

Going back to the quote from James, humans are just as instinctual as other animals and sentient animals learn from experience just as much as humans. Animals also adapt their behavior in real-time in dynamic environments. That is the whole point of the quote.

"Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape—he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent."
Jacob Bronowski — Harry Hindu

Animals; and plants, fungi, bacteria and all other living organisms for that matter; shape the landscape. Beavers build dams that create lakes that provide habitat for fish that provide food for eagles. Grasses prevent erosion and create prairies. They are are also explorers of nature and have migrated to every continent.

Jaegwon Kim has a series of monographs that are widely considered devastating for the idea of strong emergence given certain presuppositions (roughly a supervenience substance metaphysics where things just are what they are made of, e.g. things as ensembles of particles). This doesn't make me skeptical of emergence though, quite the opposite, it makes me skeptical of the metaphysics that seems to imply that emergence is impossible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

After my last post, I went back to Kim's paper. I immediately remembered why I disliked it so much. He seems to have missed the point. He focuses on causation between hierarchical levels of scale, especially causation from above. In past discussions on the forum, in particular by Apokrisis, as well as my own reading, it is not causation from above that is central to emergence, it's constraint from above.

Another thing that undermined the credibility of the paper for me is the fact that he never mentioned Anderson's "More is Different," a paper, written in 1972, which is still considered important today.

The issue is whether it is possible to make a distinction between the organism's perception of its environment and its evolution with respect to its environment. Put differently, is perception the organism’s representation of a reality, or is it the enacting of a reality? In the first case, what is represented is presumed to be external to the perceiver. In the second case, the real is produced through the organism-environment interaction. — Joshs

I still don’t get it. Let’s leave it at that.

Jaegwon Kim has a series of monographs that are widely considered devastating for the idea of strong emergence given certain presuppositions (roughly a supervenience substance metaphysics where things just are what they are made of, e.g. things as ensembles of particles). This doesn't make me skeptical of emergence though, quite the opposite, it makes me skeptical of the metaphysics that seems to imply that emergence is impossible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I remember now. After you mentioned Kim’s article, I downloaded it and started reading it. I only got about a quarter of the way through and I wasn’t impressed. I should probably go back and finish. There are certain ways of thinking that are really important to me, and I don’t think I do enough to find skeptical views to put my own to the test.

That's a fantastic quote. I'll probably reuse it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's a very short book and you should be able to get it free online. It has other good stuff too.

At any rate, it misses that, in order for human culture to exist, humans have to exist. This doesn't entail that any humans ever exist without culture. It merely entails that, because humans are one thing, and not any other, this will always shape human culture.

Likewise, the realities faced by all living things, the demand to maintain homeostasis and form in the face of entropy, etc. are more general principles that will effect all cultures, human, or any other intelligent species.

More general principles explain more things, but less determinantly. So human nature explains all human cultures, but it is less definite then how cultures shape us. And thus, it can easily seem like "culture all the way down," because culture drives the particular specific details we take notice of, yet these are always against a particular background of biology, physics, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The seems like a description of emergence at the levels of human neurology, psychology, and sociology. Psychology must operate consistent with human mental processes from below, but it is also heavily influenced by social and cultural systems from above. For some reason, I thought you are a skeptic about emergence.

he does not claim that the very reality of the organism’s environment is co-constructed by the organism’s patterns of functioning in it. Instead, he assumes the reality of that environment is external to, and independent of, the organism’s limited, adaptive perception of it. — Joshs

Sorry. I don't get it. In the context of the question at hand, why does it matter whether human cognitive systems evolved in response to the environment or coevolved in concert with the environment?

That is the direction evolution seems to be headed from instinctive, hard-coded behavioral responses to general stimuli to conscious minds capable of making finer distinctions and therefore finer behavioral responses as well being able to change one's behavior based on new sensory information effectively overriding those instinctive behaviors when they are not the best response in a given situation. We can change our behavior in almost real-time compared to instinctive behaviors which can take generations to change. — Harry Hindu

I think this is an over simplistic understanding. This is from William James’ book “What is an Instinct?”

“Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by “reason.”...[But] the facts of the case are really tolerably plain! Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as “blind” as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man’s memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results…

…It is plain then that, no matter how well endowed an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be much modified if the instincts combine with experience, if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale…

…there is no material antagonism between instinct and reason…”

This was written more than 100 years ago, but it is consistent with other things I have read that are more recent.

Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind.

It doesn’t have to, but it does.

Ok - but isn't making that distinction an application of logic? So it can't server as the justification for logic... — Banno

Is this response aimed at my position or his? I don’t see how it’s relevant to mine.

Just as there is no ocean "outside of" ocean-waves, there is no "world outside ourselves" because we – our minds – are aspects of the world itself rather than a separate Cartesian substance. — 180 Proof

I just realized my first response missed your point. I guess what it comes down to is that I don't recognize Descartes' thinking vs. extended substances as any different from any other kind of distinction.

Just as there is no ocean "outside of" ocean-waves, there is no "world outside ourselves" because we – our minds – are aspects of the world itself rather than a separate Cartesian substance. — 180 Proof

@tom111's whole argument is based on distinctions between aspects of the world, i.e. separate Cartesian substances. If you're going to forbid their use, the entire thread dissolves. Yes, there is a place where you and I can stand and see that all these distinctions are arbitrary. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable for us to pick a different perspective, one from which the distinction between what's inside me and what's outside me is useful. There is an interesting difference between a rock and the pain I feel when I drop it on my foot.

What’s missing from Lorenz’a account is the more recent appreciation on the part of biologists of the reciprocal nature of the construction of the real. It is not simply a matter of the organism adapting itself to the facts of its environment, but of those very facts being a product of reciprocal alterations that go back and forth between organism and the world that it sets up for itself. — Joshs

So... living organisms, including humans, affect the environment and organisms and environments evolve together. Agreed. That's not "missing from Lorenz's account." It's just not particularly relevant to the specific point he, and I, are trying to make which is - human minds, including our intellectual capacities, evolved in the same manner that our physical bodies did. Logic is something we brought to the world.