Nonetheless, I'm more willing to submit my statements and arguments to rational, evidence-based cross-examination than you 'woo-of-the-gaps bible-thumoers'. — 180 Proof

I don't think that's true. Also, I've never thumped a bible. If you were paying any attention to my arguments at all, you'd know I don't make any claims about God. My only claims are about your and your cohort's arguments.

We don't need no stinking philosophers.
— T Clark
Ah yeah, the reek of sophistry. — 180 Proof

Calling oneself a philosopher doesn't make your ideas better.

Are there any philosophers on this site? — Tom Storm

There are some very smart people with very good ideas who express them very well here on the forum. Yes, I am avoiding your question.

How about a little more philosophizing and a lot less rationalizing 'fetishes & fairytales'? — 180 Proof

How about a little more philosophizing and a lot less fetishizing rationality fairytales?

Did you see that, how I turned that around. Now that's philosophy!

Thanks everyone for your thoughts — Troyster

There's a good chance there is someone in your area who teaches Buddhist meditation or a similar practice. Find them and start practicing. You should be able to start out without a major disruption to your life. Find out if it's for you. Fit it into your life in the best way for you. See where it goes.

I would be flattered to be considered even a "silly" or misguided philosopher. — ToothyMaw

I aspire to be a pretty smart guy with pretty good ideas who expresses them pretty well. From what I've seen, you meet those criteria pretty frequently. We don't need no stinking philosophers.

Why are there so many repeated OP-topics... Why don't you (and others) use the forum's search function before starting a thread on a topic which has been done to death — 180 Proof

Come on, 180, if we didn't repeat threads ad nauseum, we'd have nothing to talk about. I once counted six threads about free will active at the same time. It's the same as it ever was. It would be nice if people waited a couple of weeks between copycat threads, but don't hold your breath.

"God" is an anxiety (i.e. placebo-fetish), not an entity (i.e. "invisible friend"). :gasp: — 180 Proof

I don't consider your opinions about religious believers' beliefs or psychological motivations credible. You're just too biased.

If you are referring to me, however, I am flattered. — ToothyMaw

I was referring to the argument, not you.

Your definition is far more narrow than any definition of omnipotence I've seen. — ToothyMaw

Seems like a pretty good definition to me. Anyway, it doesn't matter what you think or what @180 Proof thinks the right definition is.

But this actually matters sort of - at least to philosophers of religion. — ToothyMaw

That just shows how silly philosophers can be - trying to trick God into a contradiction rather than worshiping him.

Whenever I come across the old omnipotent God/immovable object argument I always want to ask "In a fight between Superman and Santa Claus, who would win." Your response is better.

But I cannot worship him. It is servile. I cannot pledge allegiance to some faith, as I know the vast majority of my friends will not do this, and so I would be selling them out to save my own neck. — RolandTyme

In order for this argument to be meaningful, you have to consider that hell is real and as described by some religious sources. You write about it as if is comparable to being fired or getting divorced. If you believe it exists then you risk eternity in the most torturous pain imaginable just to show God who's boss and stand behind your friends.

Followers of religion never seem to present things in this way. — RolandTyme

I've been annoyed by what I see as the arrogance of this type of believer before. On the other hand, they see hell and damnation as facts. For them to present things otherwise would be denying their God. I don't see "Well, if God's going to be a jerk, screw him" as a very good strategy.

I can't consider something "good evidence" (or not good) when there isn't any evidence given (by you et al) to consider. — 180 Proof

This is just more anti-religious bigotry, so prevalent here on the forum.

"Evidence for God" such as? A dozen years of Catholic education (including Bible Study and altar boy service) as well as over a decade more of earnest comparative religions study, yet thirty-odd years on this "evidence" still eludes me. — 180 Proof

As I noted, the fact that you don't consider something good evidence doesn't mean it isn't evidence. That's one of the things reason is supposed to do, provide a process for working these things out. Your typical smarty-pants response does not constitute reason.

I would even include scripture as evidence. How one regards or rates this evidence is a different matter. — Tom Storm

Yes. I agree.

It's a perennial title, a meditation handbook. — Wayfarer

I'm sure it's come up on the forum before. I just haven't followed up on it.

I think this is a fairly widely held view - the evidence is embodied in the experience. My reservations with this as a crass naturalist, is what counts as experience of god? Without wanting to be glib, I have no doubt that members of Islamic State and the KKK have had experiences of God which help form their beliefs and actions. — Tom Storm

I'm a non-theist who is sympathetic to religion. Your questions are good ones for which I don't have any specific answers. On the other hand, bad people can justify themselves with any kind of belief - religious, philosophical, political, nationalistic, moral...

My thoughts in this regard are mainly in reaction to those who say there is no evidence for God. There is evidence, they just aren't convinced by it. That makes a big difference to me.

But there's another set of meanings altogether, which is communicated in classics such as 'the cloud of unknowing'. That is associated with the 'negative way' of contemplative meditation - self-emptying or putting aside all discursive thought and reasoning. There are elements of that in the Socratic attitude but it is not something that ought to be over-emphasised. You also find that in Taoism - 'he that knows it, knows it not, he that knows it not, knows it'. — Wayfarer

I read the Wikipedia article on "The Cloud of Unknowing." The quotes included seemed really down to earth and practical, just, as you intimated, like the Tao Te Ching. I have been saying, without really thinking it through, that the experience of God is the evidence for God. Maybe it will help me develop a more robust understanding. I downloaded a PDF version and uploaded it to my Kindle.

Why? How does justification work? Pray tell. — Agent Smith

You make the statement, then you provide the justification. I think, in this situation, "seems to me" is a perfectly fine justification - it's like calling something a priori knowledge or self-evident. I would even agree in this case, but making a statement without that acknowledgement is not philosophy. Philosophy, in this context at least, requires reason. Reason requires justification for statements.

I don't have to prove it exists. You made the claim. You have to provide the justification.
— T Clark

Well, I did, didn't I? I know of no actual infinities. Do you? — Agent Smith

That is not justification of any sort. No need to go on with this. I've had my say.

Descartes said that the idea of God requires a soul for it to be understood. You're saying even understanding infinity requires more than matter.
— Gregory

Yep, that's about the gist of my argument. — Agent Smith

You haven't made an argument, you've made a statement.

You are the one who says there is no physical infinity. Prove your statement. — jgill

Well, I haven't found any infinity that's actual. There! — Agent Smith

You don't seem to understand how this whole justification thing works.

Too, you have it easier. You need to furnish as proof only one infinity that's actual. Kindly do so. Thank you very much. — Agent Smith

You don't seem to understand how this whole philosophy thing works.

Name one example of an actual infinity. — Agent Smith

I don't have to prove it exists. You made the claim. You have to provide the justification.

There are no actual infinities; there are no physical infinities. — Agent Smith

Sez you.

I suggest you give a small, supported argument to back up your assertion, because the metaphysics taking place on your thread are in no way contradictory to anything stated here that has been supported with research. Perhaps the opposite. — Garrett Travers

Your entire argument is metaphysical. I think your rigid reductionism blinds you to that. As I've said elsewhere, metaphysical arguments can not be resolved empirically, and that's your whole argument. You keep asking for scientific evidence. There isn't any. There can't be any.

The "metaphysics taking place on [my] thread" does contradict your position.

I don't know if this qualifies as successful reductionism but in chemistry class, thousands of years ago, the fact that ice floats on water was explained to me in terms of Hydrogen bonding. I felt quite satisfied with the answer: the H bonds meant that water molecules, quite literally, kept each other at a distance and this results in an increase in overall volume for the same mass of liquid water, making ice less dense than liquid water; hence, said my teach, ice floats on water.

Can this be done for all phenomena? — Agent Smith

As Anderson acknowledged, higher levels in a hierarchy develop based on the principles of the lower level, i.e. reductionism. That does not mean that you can predict the behavior of phenomena of the higher level based on the rules of the lower level, i.e. constructivism. So, once we know the behavior of ice, we can explain it in terms of chemical bonds. The question is, could we predict it from just the facts of chemistry. I don't know. Anderson doesn't claim that you can never predict higher level behavior based on lower level principles. His position describes the general condition. So, according to Anderson, no, it can't be done for all phenomena.

Consciousness, thus far, has been resistant to such a treatment. Nobody has been able to convincingly explain how electrochemical events in the brain produce thinking/thoughts. We know the two are correlated (brain experiments prove that), but how exactly is still a mystery. — Agent Smith

Anderson says that biology is not psychology, which makes sense to me. That doesn't mean that the behavior of mental processes can't be explained by biological principles.

No, it hsn't so far. Again, you're going to have to contend with the scientific research before you get to make that kind of claim, which you haven't done. — Garrett Travers

I suggest other participants in this discussion take a look and decide for themselves.

The discussion in the Reductionism and the Hierarchy of Scale thread makes it clear why the premise of this thread and reductionism in general is baloney.

Any knowledge we glean from other scales than the one we find ourselves living in are only useful in the scale we find ourselves living in. We only use states at other scales to explain the behavior of objects on the scale we live in — Harry Hindu

I think that's true.

If use is the scale by which we judge metaphysical factors, then it seems to me that the scales would be epistemological in nature, as in existing in our minds only and not the way the world is actually divided. — Harry Hindu

I think that's true too.

Really? I think that history is full of examples of societies collapsing because of the unsustainability of the system and the incapability of the elite to solve the societies problems. Civil wars, upheavals, political turmoil, show that this balance hasn't been the result. — ssu

And the history of life is full of examples of species collapsing because of the competition from invasive organisms, asteroid impacts, vulcanism, global warming, over-hunting... The evolutionary process at any level is constantly changing.

Why should you represent reality into the physics-chemistry-biology-cosmology division in the first place? — EugeneW

As I indicated in my OP, I think that's a metaphysical division. It's useful, so we use it.

What do you make of theoretical physics, by and large an extension of math, math itself a very abstract (mental) subject/field?

I'm sure you're aware of it, but the existence of some "physical" objects like quarks and the God particle (the Higgs-Boson) were deduced from mathematical models of the particle world. That is to say, our minds seem to be in the know about objects and goings on at scales that are clearly not human (we normally can't see quarks or Higgs-Bosons). — Agent Smith

I'm skeptical of this view, but I don't know enough to give a very credible response.

On the larger point you made, I agree: each level of organization of matter & energy, as represented broadly in the sequence physics →→ chemistry →→ biology →→ psychology has its own unique, level-specific entities (particles in physics and chemistry, cells in biology, and minds in psychology) which operate under, yet again, tier-specific rules. The reductionist enterprise is a waste of time, something like that. — Agent Smith

Yes. Frustration from arguments with reductionists brought me to this subject in the first place.

Peirce developed the fully triadic view where actuality was sandwiched between top-down necessity (or constraint) and bottom-up possibility (or unconstrained potential). — apokrisis

Do you have a specific reference?

So the constraints don't arise out of already concrete material foundations. Constraints (or universals) only "exist" if they have proved to be of the right type to conjure a Cosmos into being out of raw possibility. That is, if they could produce the concrete material foundations needed to instantiate themselves as systems composed of those kinds of atoms/events/processes/etc.

Our cosmos has a dimensional structure, an evolutionary logic, a thermodynamic flow. We can go back to first principles and say that for anything to exist, it must be able to develop and persist. So there is already a selection for the global structure that works, that is rational, that can last long enough for us to be around to talk about it. — apokrisis

As I was reading this, I thought of something Hoffman wrote about in "Life's Ratchet." He was discussing how proteins became enzymes at random and then evolved powered by the pounding of fast moving molecules. The enzymes encouraged the formation of specific proteins. Some enzymes also developed, I guess you could say mutated, to include control mechanisms which allowed feedback loops to form. Then loops within loops within loops formed to become cell metabolism.

How does this fit into your military metaphor? You talk about constraints from above. How do the feedback loops constrain the chemistry? Are the products of the enzymes the soldiers? So chemicals evolve into structures that control how they behave.

If you just want technology, you only need to answer the questions concerning efficient and material causality. The questions about formal and final causality appear redundant - because you, as the human, are happy to contribute the design of the system and the purpose which it is intended to serve. — apokrisis

So, when you talk about design in this context, you are talking about the effects of this evolutionary process. I remember reading about controversies about Darwinian evolution. How can a mechanistic process "design" something. Saying "design by survival of the fittest" is a circular argument, because fitness is defined by what survives. That always struck me as a trivial thing to get stuck on.

Now this brings to mind other things you've written in past discussions - about semiotics and information. I'll have to go back and reread some of those. Are we talking about the same kind of thing?

Reductionists and holists mean different things when they talk about hierarchical order. — apokrisis

I thought about you when I was writing these posts. The subject reminded me of discussions we've had in the past. I'm glad you responded.

But a holist thinks dualistically in terms of upwards construction working in organic interaction with downwards constraint. So you have causality working both ways at once, synergistically, to produce the functioning whole. — apokrisis

When you talk about downward constraints, are you just talking about the normal rules of the more complex level of the hierarchy, e.g. are chemical interactions constrained by the rules of biology, or is it something else? Where did those constraints come from if not constructed from below?

(as hierarchy theorist, Stan Salthe, dubs it) — apokrisis

I went to his web page and I'm reading some of his articles.

A simple analogy. If you want an army, you must produce soldiers. You must take average humans with many degrees of freedom (all the random and unstable variety of 18 year olds) and mould them in a boot camp environment which strictly limits those freedoms to the behaviours found to be useful for "an army". You must simplify and standardise a draft of individuals so that they can fit together in a collective and interchangeable fashion that then acts in concert to express the mind and identity of a "military force". — apokrisis

This is a good analogy. It clarified things for me. I still don't get the mechanism that generates the constraints.

For example, it makes everything historically or developmentally emergent - the upward construction and the downward constraint. There is no fundamental atomistic grain - a collection of particles - that gets everything started. Instead, that grain is what gets produced by the top-down constraints. The higher order organisation stabilises its own ground of being in bootstrap fashion. It gives shape to the very stuff that composes it. — apokrisis

Looking at it this way makes the artificiality of the layered hierarchy clearer.

well said but we can go deeper than that. all of these fields are expressed through math. ultimately our descriptions of the brain and consciousness are just math. mind is math. then look at important findings in math like godel incompleteness amongst others all suggestions on limits to self reference. paradox is inherent in any (self)description of the mind. — Apustimelogist

Oops. My post was intended to be ironic. I reject a reductionist approach to understanding and I was trying to show the somewhat absurd consequences of taking it to an extreme.

Welcome to the forum.

I am disagree with him in terms that chemistry is more "complex" than social science. — javi2541997

As you go down the hierarchy from particle physics to psychology, complexity increases.

Why does it be hierarchical? I do not see why it is so necessary to put Chemistry above social sciences. Is this means that one is more important than the other? — javi2541997

The hierarchy is of scale and complexity, not importance. Anderson is very clear about that. That's really the whole point of his paper and this thread.

I am disagree when he states: Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. Why? I guess everything could be connected together, just a little bit. — javi2541997

Anderson is clear that there are connections between levels and about what those connections are. He says "...one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy according to the idea: The elementary entities of science [at one level] obey the laws of science... [at the previous level]."

In the other hand, where can we put philosophy itself in the levels? We can say, probably, that philosophy is above all the list, maybe? Because if we keep in mind the Greek classical thought we can be agree that critical thought, thus philosophy, has developed those hierarchical list — javi2541997

I think you're exactly right. That's what I meant when I said the hierarchy is a metaphysical entity. Philosophy isn't included in the hierarchy, it created it.

To continue…

The paper by J.W. Anderson I referenced in my previous post, “More is Different” has a different take on reductionism and the hierarchy of scientific scale than the one I discussed in my previous post.

The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much to those of society.

The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy according to the idea: The elementary entities of science [at one level] obey the laws of science [at the previous level].

• Elementary particle physics
• Solid state or many-body physics
• Chemistry
• Molecular biology
• Cell biology
• Physiology
• Psychology
• Social sciences

But this hierarchy does not imply that science X is “just applied Y.” At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.

As I indicated, I’m not really sure if Anderson’s view is a metaphysical or a scientific approach. Either way, I think it reinforces my understanding that each level on the hierarchy of scale provides information and understanding not provided at the other levels.

The limits of reason is a common theme. How one responds to that may differ. I don't think there is anything equivalent to enlightenment through surrender in Plato or Aristotle. — Fooloso4

For me, the question is whether the spiritual phenomena described in the two different philosophies represent the same, or similar, human experiences. I think they probably do.

Aporia is somehow supposed to (magically?) lead us directly to the doorstep of Epicurus (re: hedonism). How that's achieved is a mystery to me! Like I said, aporia is not exactly my idea of fun! — Agent Smith

This is what came to mind when I read your first post - I have found, personally, that a confusing situation resolves itself when you give up, surrender, to the uncertainty. Alan Watts has a book called "The Wisdom of Insecurity." That surrender of will is part of many spiritual traditions. Looking in from the outside, it's always seemed to me that Zen practice is set up to frustrate practitioners and that enlightenment is a final surrender.

Reasoning encounters a point beyond which it cannot go. A point at which we are confronted by our ignorance without a way to move past it to truth and knowledge. — Fooloso4

I wonder if you are talking about the same thing I am.

There is no question that the mind is physical...The evidence for a material mind isn't controversial. — Philosophim

There is no question that chemistry is just particle physics.
There is no question that cell biology is just chemistry.
There is no question that neurology is just cell biology.
There is no question that the mind is just neurology.

Therefore - There is no question that the mind is just particle physics.

Condemnation of the invasion does not require ignoring:

"This intellectual framing according to which events occurring in proximity to the Rhine and the Danube possess greater inherent importance than events near the Tigris or the Nile dates from the age of Western imperialism.
— Bacevich — Paine

I find Bacevich's contention that the Ukraine invasion is much less damaging and disruptive than the US's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan convincing.