Still saying Gavin Newsom.
— Wayfarer

Care to bet? — Mikie

No :yikes: It's only that he's always struck me as telegenic and articulate. Whoever it is, I think it's an absolutely crucial choice.

removing a presumptive nominee, forcing him to step aside, and replacing him with someone else isn’t. — NOS4A2

He wasn't removed, or threatened with the noose :rage: He was persuaded to retire rather than contest and made a principled decision in the interests of the greater good (although in my view about 6 months too late.)

I think it's utterly hilarous that Mike Johnson is threatening to sue the Democratic Party to force them to bring Biden back. They're upset over the $10million they spent on Biden attack ads and want their money back. Hilarious.

Still saying Gavin Newsom. He's got higher recognition, I think, and he's been running a shadow campaign.

Literally overturns an election. — NOS4A2

What 'election' has been overturned? The votes from the primaries are not formally attached to a candidate until the Convention. It would be quite possible for a winning candidate to be injured or fall ill and so not be the final choice at the Convention. This is no different, the candidate in question has simply, and sensibly, decided to retire rather than seek another term.

And although obviously a close-run thing, I would have thought that any candidate who DID NOT try and overthrow the 2020 election would have a clear advantage.

Philosophers may catch up in their own sweet time. If they have nothing better to do. — apokrisis

What do you call a Greek skydiver?

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form.
— Wayfarer

But then you would have to explain how exactly. What changes? What creates this epistemic cut? — apokrisis

Without doubting that the scientific modelling of the biochemistry involved, the question remains, to what end? For what purpose?

You said upthread:

We are modellers that exist by modelling. There are naturally progressive levels to this modelling. Words and then numbers have lifted humans to a certain rather vertiginous point. Numbers as the ultimate abstractions – variables in equations matched to squiggles on dials – take the basic epistemic duality of generalisation and particularisation to their most rarified extreme. I don't really see what comes next.... — apokrisis

Maybe it's because the only aims in your philosophy are instrumental and pragmatic. No 'beyond'.

How easily you slide from the germane to the ridiculous. — apokrisis

Don't mistake whimsicality for ridicule. There is a serious point about the reason for existence. I'm suggesting that life provides a means for the disclosure of horizons of being that otherwise cannot be realised. From a review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos:

Nagel’s starting point is not simply that he finds materialism partial or unconvincing, but that he himself has a metaphysical view or vision of reality that just cannot be accommodated within materialism. This vision is that the appearance of conscious beings in the universe is somehow what it is all for; that ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself’.

That is something lacking in your account. Your deprecation of Pierce's idealism likewise, that it only existed because 'science hadn't yet figured out the physical causes yet'. The reason you're critical of reductionism is not philosophical, but technical - semiotics provides a better metaphor for living processes than machines. And yet your descriptions are still illustrated with 'switches' and 'mechanisms' and energy dissipation - it is still resolutely physicalist in a way that I don't think C S Peirce himself ever was.

That "ought" thing, again. — Banno

Quite.

There's three paragraphs in your essay I need to consider more deeply and I'll get back to you. — Tom Storm

I get it. I'm not entirely happy with it, that's one of the reasons I haven't written many more.

I'm kind of on board with Kastrup's terminology, but not unreservedly.

Do you consider phenomenology, in some of its guises (perhaps the neurophenomenological of Francisco Varela) to be a compromise between your position and one shaped by embodied cognition? — Tom Storm

Thanks! Not a compromise, but an inspiration, the subject I'm working to understand.

In your Mind At Large article, you distinguished Scientific Materialism from Scientifically-Informed Idealism. — Gnomon

Yes, well put. That's exactly what I have in mind. A convergence between cognitivism and philosophical idealism.

For me, it's definitely not the God of Theology, but more like the Way-Path (organizing principle) of Taoism, or the Logos (rational principle) of Western Philosophy. Is my reckoning even close to your standpoint? :smile: — Gnomon

:100:

So the mistake in terms of idealism is to treat "mind" as something as foundational as substantial being. — apokrisis

I can see why you would say that, but your perspective is predicated on the physicalist notion that mind is 'the product of' the brain. I really don't know if your philosophical mentor, C S Peirce, would have endorsed that. I find his metaphysics hard to fathom, but he does say that 'matter is effete mind'. 'Effete' means 'degenerate' or 'depleted' or sapped of its original vitality. What 'mind' is in Peirce is nothing at all like the Cartesian 'res cogitans' which he views as completely mistaken. He proposes a continuum between mind and matter, where they are not entirely distinct but different manifestations of the same underlying reality (and which I don't think can be described in terms of physics). He suggests that mind and matter are fundamentally connected, with mind being a more dynamic and vital principle, while matter represents a more static and inert state. By saying "matter is effete mind," Peirce implies that matter is a kind of mind that has lost its vitality and dynamism. In other words, what we perceive as physical matter is, in essence, mind that has become fixed and less active. Kind of like your hair- or finger-nail clippings in relation to your whole body, or your whole body after death. I sometimes muse that matter consists entirely of fossils.

I note that in philosophy encyclopedias, Peirce is categorised as an objective idealist, positing that the physical world is not independent of the mind but is intertwined with it. In his view, reality consists of both mental and material elements that are deeply interconnected. He proposed that the universe has a mental or spiritual dimension that cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone. That is central to his idea of agapē-ism, that love, understood as a creative and unifying force, plays a crucial role in the development and evolution of the universe and is a fundamental principle that guides the growth of complexity and order in the cosmos. He believed that the creative and purposive aspects of evolution could not be fully explained by natural selection alone. In that he was a lot more like Henri Bergson than Richard Dawkins.

Even if the organism is also still a self-organising dissipative structure, just now self-organising in a self-interested fashion by virtue of being able to encode information. — apokrisis

From an idealist standpoint, it is equally plausible to see the emergence of organic life as the first stirrings of intentionality in physical form. Of course primitive and simple organic forms have practically zero self-awareness or consciousness in any complex sense, but already there the self-other distinction is operative, as it must be, for the organism's first task is to remain separate. The dissolution of the self-other boundary is death. So then through the evolutionary process, what we're seeing is ever-expanding horizons of being. The appearance of life is the appearance of perspective - of 'what it is like to be' a bat or whatever else. Alan Watts' cosmic hide-and-seek, in which the Universe appears to itself in any number of guises. And in Nagel's 'Mind and Cosmos', he entertains the notion that in life, the universe is becoming self-aware, 'waking up', as he puts it. I find that more congruent with Peirce's philosophy than any form of physicalism.

It should be reported as: ‘President Biden has decided not to contest the next election, and instead to retire. He has endorsed his VP…’ etc, instead of all this breathless hyperbole.

Still, it would have been far better had he made the decision before the primaries. Regardless, it’s still imperative that the MAGA cult is thwarted.

As biological creatures, we only need to insert ourselves into our worlds in a semiotically constructed fashion. — apokrisis

You’re selling us short ;-)

I can't accept GPT as authoritative — Banno

There’s no requirement to. I used it to generate a useful summary rather than going to the trouble of drafting one de novo. Like a glossary entry.

I can't see how to make sense of (the in itself) in a way that enables it to be useful. If there is a way that things are that is outside of our comprehension, then it is irrelevant to that comprehension. The only practical consequence can be a nod to the mysterious, and silence. We cannot access "the world as it is in itself", not because it represents some profound fact about the world and our relation to it, but because the thing-in-itself is a useless metaphysical construct. — Banno

Knowledge of appearances *is* knowledge of phenomena. It can be and is consistent and effective without it needing to be all-knowing. The “thing in itself” is a boundary in Kant's system; it marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery.. Through that it serves to keep us humble. I see it as a modest claim, not as a sweeping declaration. ‘What we see is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’

As for as Kastrup’s idealism - I do question the ‘mind at large’ idea in this essay - Is there ‘mind at large’? - although it’s quite a long piece so don’t feel any obligation.

So I just read that she reacted to Biden's endorsement by saying she hopes to "earn and win" the nomination. So she considers herself in the race, but not the heir apparent. — Echarmion

That’s encouraging. I’ve been reading that there’s the chance of an ‘open convention’, but that in the past these haven’t been very successful. But if it is an open convention, I hope another candidate comes of it.

I just read an article, in Beshara magazine, entitled Mind Over Matter*3. It's an interview with Bernardo Kastrup about his Analytical Idealism beliefs. One of his responses refers to Matter as an "extended transpersonal form of mind". Again, that sounds like Cosmic Mind-stuff (res cogitans) is a non-local ideal substance that can be molded into various forms of extended substance (res extensa). — Gnomon

I know that interview. I’ve been reading and listening to Kastrup the last couple of years. He’s an articulate defender of philosophical idealism. (A lot of people think ‘idealism’ is the belief in ideals, It’s not. It goes back to the ‘ideas’ of Plato, which are arguably the starting-point of Western philosophy,)

It is true that neither idealism or materialism are falsifiable in Popper’s sense, but the point of falsifiability is not to establish what is true, but what is a testable claim. Classic examples Popper gave of non-testable hypotheses were Marxism and psycho-analysis, because they could accomodate any counter-factuals on an ad hoc basis - no claim could prove them wrong. Whereas a proper scientific theory is always open to refutation by new facts.

Philosophical ideas are not necessarily hypotheses in the scientific sense. They’re more like frameworks. The subject is generally discussed under ‘philosophy of mind’ so it might be useful to seek out primers on that topic. Banno points out that idealism is very much a minority position in the academic mainstream, but there are some.

I should add, that idealism itself as a philosophical term really only came into vogue after Descartes and his division of res cogitans and res extensia (customarily described as mind and matter in this context.) The Aristotelian matter-form duality was not divisible in that sense, as form and matter always co-exist in a particular. There’s an article by a Buddhist studies scholar that has a useful summary under heading 2a http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/articles/intro.html

I don’t know if Harris will end up as the nominee, and not confident that she can win. But let’s see what happens.

I followed this exchange with one part interest and three parts bafflement, but I also remembered a book I have saved in my Google Books library which may be of interest as it seems to be very much about the substance of your disagreement - Modes of Knowledge of the Transcendental, Henri Oosthout. The reason I call attention to it, is from my very brief reading, the is very much concerned with he problem of reflexivity in transcendental knowledge - how the self can know the self.

If there is a God….. — Igitur

That basically excludes Buddhism, which is not predicated on there being a God. It might be better phrased ‘if there is a higher truth’ or something along those lines. What you’re expressing is quite a well-trodden path for the last few centuries, what with the growth of globalisation and new religious movements. (But then I’m writing as a long-time habitué of the now long-gone Adyar Bookshop).

God likely doesn't care if you follow a particular religion, but only if you act according to the correct concepts — Igitur

Have a read of Karl Rahner’s rather controversial concept of the ‘anonymous Christian’, which

declares that all individuals, who sincerely seek truth and goodness, and strive to follow the moral truths they know, can respond positively to God's grace, albeit unknowingly or indirectly, even if they do so through other religious traditions and/or are not explicitly aware of Jesus Christ. In other words, God's grace, including the benefits of Christ's sacrifice, are not confined to the boundaries of any particular religious tradition or by our awareness or acceptance of Christian doctrine. Instead, anyone who lives a life of love and goodness, guided by the moral teachings found in Christianity, even if they don't consciously identify with it, is implicitly united with Christ and can be saved through him, implying that non-Christians can still be recipients of God's grace and attain salvation.

:clap: fair points. But I think a more ‘Buddhist’ attitude to production and consumption a la Schumacher's Small is Beautiful would not be amiss. (Not that I can claim any moral high ground in that regard.) But culture and society needs an ideal other than limitless growth and endless consumption. Who’s providing a model for that?

And I agree that there is a division here that needs acknowledgement. For Way, it is the difference between the world and mind. For me, it is the difference between how things are and how they ought be. — Banno

Thanks for the compliment, appreciated. This forum has been a great learning experience for me. I had never heard of Davidson or Austin, for example, whereas I have at least now read their SEP entries. Where we diverge, I think, is that my overall approach is more counter-cultural, than oriented with respect to mainstream Anglo philosophy. But, I continue to learn and there is much more to be discovered. I do follow up on many of the topic discussed and debated here.

The argument attempts to show that the world is partially mental, but only succeeded in showing that the what we say about the world is "mental".

That is, the argument presented here does not demonstrate it's conclusion. — Banno

Note at the outset, I don’t pretend to claim to show what the world really is. Physicalism claims that the world really is physical. Customarily, idealism is often taken to claim the world really is mental. But note at the outset I say ‘I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise.’

I will add that whatever we say about the fundamental constituents of the world and whatever they may be, when they appear to us, they do so as elements of experience, even if mediated by symbolic representations such as mathematics. As Apokrisis rightly noted, it’s an epistemological form of idealism. And actually it’s most closely related to Buddhist philosophy - Leontiskos correctly recognised its connection to the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism.

I asked ChatGPT to provide a brief account of the distinction between epistemological and ontological idealism:

Epistemological idealism and ontological idealism both emphasize the centrality of the mind in understanding reality, but they focus on different aspects of the relationship between mind and world. Epistemological idealism concerns itself with the nature and scope of human knowledge, asserting that what we can know about the world is inherently shaped by the structures of our minds. This perspective holds that our understanding of reality is mediated by our perceptions, concepts, and cognitive faculties, suggesting that we cannot access the world as it is in itself, independent of our mental activities. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant exemplify this view, arguing that while things-in-themselves (noumena) exist, our knowledge is limited to phenomena—the world as it appears to us through our cognitive filters.

Ontological idealism, on the other hand, posits that reality itself is fundamentally mental or immaterial in nature. This viewpoint claims that what exists is inextricably linked to or constituted by consciousness. In its strong form, as articulated by George Berkeley, ontological idealism denies the existence of a mind-independent material world altogether, maintaining that only minds and their ideas exist. In this view, objects are collections of ideas perceived by a mind, and their existence depends on being perceived. Ontological idealism thus extends beyond the limits of human knowledge to propose a metaphysical thesis about the very nature of being.

Many grey areas and porous boundaries to be sure, but I’m nearer the first. No coincidence that I discovered Kant through The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T R V Murti, which has extensive comparisons of Kant and Madhyamaka philosophy (the ‘middle-way’ school of Mahāyāna Buddhism). But there are many cross-overs and commonalities with Kant, phenomenology and Madhyamaka, exemplified for instance in The Embodied Mind and in John Vervaeke’s lectures.

Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis ~ Wayfarer

This has not been demonstrated. What has been shown is that what we know "has an inextricably mental aspect". — Banno

Right. I should have said ‘being’ has an inextricably mental aspect. But this requires a differentiation between ‘being’ and ‘what exists’, which is itself contentious and which I’ve had many arguments over.

Suffice to ask: who was the source of the well-known aphorism ‘What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ Why, that was Werner Heisenberg, but here I’m quoting him as a scientifically-informed philosopher, and in support of an overall Kantian attitude, recognising the distinction between phenomena (what appears) and the unknowable in-itself. Likewise Neils Bohr’s ‘In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.’ Examples could be multiplied.

But does anyone claim that your observation --- of a "collapsing" quantum event for instance --- creates the actual world that I personally routinely experience, apart from scientific experiments/measurements? Or that we collectively "participate" in creation of the world that we all more or less agree is out there? — Gnomon

The salient point is that we’re participants, moral agents, in our own lives, whereas scientific objectivity is predicated on the separateness of subject and object. We’re behind the glass, or in the observatory, looking out, or looking up. And while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions, and need to sense that we are participants in a meaningful cosmos, not just ‘heat sinks’ doing our own little bit towards maximising entropy.

I think there’s a resonance between Wheelers ‘participatory universe’ and the pre-modern sense of the same, whereby you’re related to the cosmos at large through the mythological re-enactment of creation (someone quipped in one of those YouTube videos I’ve been watching, every observation in physics is a mini-big-bang). But the key insight I take from it is the realisation that reality, being itself, however you want to designate it, is not something we’re outside of or separate from. It’s more than an objective reality, it includes both subject and object in a larger whole. That is what I think the shock of quantum physics has obliged us to recognise. Phenomenology has been more aware of that, as has its offspring existentialism. That’s why ‘objectivity’ is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for truth. I requires more than objectivity - something like sagacity, an insight into the whole.

(I like to say ‘naturalism is concerned with what you see looking out the window. Phenomenology is concerned with ‘you looking out the window’. In other words, it includes the experience of looking.)

" ...it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind."
yet
"...its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have" — Banno

Cherry-picked. The full passage is:

it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.

Can you see the distinction? That what is empirically true is not the whole story?

Do you assume that 'the wavefunction' itself is mind-independent¹ (whether it 'collapses' (Copenhagen) or not (Everett))? — 180 Proof

It’s not a question of whether the ‘wave function’ is or isn’t mind-dependent. The equation describes the distribution of probabilities. When the measurement is taken the possibilities all reduce to a specific outcome. That is the ‘collapse’. Measurement is what does that, but measurement itself is not specified by the equation, and besides it leaves open the question of in what sense the particle exists prior to measurement. The Everett theory avoids all of those problems by saying the collapse never occurs, but with the implication that there are infinitely many worlds.

The deep question, to refer you to Pattee again, is how can a molecule be a message? How does genetic information regulate a metabolic flow? — apokrisis

It is a deep question but not the question I’ve been addressing. Maybe that book I’ve found on biosemiotics and philosophy of mind will have some insights.

First job was to wind you back from confusing cognition as epistemic method with cognition as some kind of ontological mind stuff that grounds mind-independent reality. — apokrisis

If you looked at the Mind Created World piece, I explicitly state that I am not arguing for any such thing.

The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or ‘mind-stuff’, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesn’t posit that there is any ‘mind-stuff’ existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics). — Wayfarer

(Banno’s is the first objection.)

If we couldn't generalise, your landscapes would just be a blooming, buzzing confusion of specks of light. We would not parse into shapes and objects of some more generalised type. We couldn't imagine the land held stories that might connect it as a more general historical flow. — apokrisis

But how does that detract from what I’m saying? Pinter’s book makes that precise point - that we organise cognition around Gestalts, meaningful wholes, precisely in terms of what is meaningful to our animal sensibility. He provides evidence that this is the case even in insect cognition (with the fairy-fly as an example, so small as to be imperceptible to the naked eye.) Mind does that, either animal or human, although only we can bring that fact into rational introspection. Gestalts, forms, don’t exist outside of minds. (I recommend that book - he doesn’t use it to argue for idealism, if that’s something that would put you off, although there are references to Kant.)

The point about quantum physics, is that, had the realist vision come to fruition, we might have really located the imperishable point-particles of atomism, fundamental entities with an unambiguous existence. But we didn’t. The debate between Bohr and Einstein was around Einstein’s fervent belief in a realistic ontology, as opposed to Bohr’s more philosophically subtle attitude. But then I’m sure you know all that. The only salient point for my argument is the sense in which the measurement problem undermines the presumptively mind-independent nature of sub-atomic particles - that at some fundamental level, the separation of observer and observed no longer holds. And that’s because in the final analysis, reality is not objective but participatory. We’re not outside of or apart from reality - one of the fundamental insights both of phenomenology and non-dualism. It’s easy to say, but hard to see.

So yes, modernity might create Cartesian anxiety. But that arises from a dichotomising logic being allowed to make an ontic claim – mind and matter as two incommensurate substances, two general forms of causality – and failing to see that the ontic position is that the cosmos just happens to have these epistemising organisms evolving within it as a further expression of the Second Law. — apokrisis

I agree with your description of the problem, but your answer is biological, not existential. You’re not seeing the plight of modernity from an existential perspective. It always seems to me you’re appropriating philosophical terminology for another purpose, to do with biology and engineering. That’s why you’re quite happy to dismiss the idealistic aspects of C S Peirce while utilising his logic for those purposes.

But this just means that knowing, believing, conjecturing, doubting or whatever are dependent on us; but not that the world is dependent on us. — Banno

You have a world in mind when you say that. Anyway I’m out on family time for today.

Sure. But that was a notable instance.

There are three problems - the puzzle of other people, the fact that we are sometimes wrong, and the inevitability of novelty - each of which points to there being meadows and butterflies and other people, despite what you have in mind. I think you know that idealism won't cut it." — Banno

Nothing I've said calls that into question, though. I've said, I'm not questioning the existence of unseen worlds, other minds, and unknown facts. It's not as if before I open my eyes, the world doesn't exist, and that it begins to exist when I do. It is an empirical fact that a world exists independently of your mind and mine. But both you and I bring a perspective to any scene. We have a framework within which we agree on north and south, and much else - but that itself is constructed by the brain/mind. It's not a solitary perspective, as we share a world, a culture, a language model, and much else besides (hence, not solipsistic). So we will all agree on north and south and many other facts. But all of those agreements still rely on perspective, we're part of a community of minds agreeing and disagreeing. If I was a member of a different culture, I might see the vista in a completely different light, as a 'sacred site' or something similar. A geologist, I'll see it as mining site. Which is it? Is it "really" a mine site or "really" a sacred site? But I'm not endorsing out-and-out relativism, 'whatever is right for you'. I'm pointing out the mind's role in constructing our apparently- external reality. It's not simply given, but always interpreted by an observer, and there really is no 'outside' that interpretation. It is intrinsic to the nature of judgement and human existence. The sense that the world exists entirely outside and separately to us is part of the condition of modernity, in particular, summarized by the expression 'cartesian anxiety':

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

The term was coined in Richard Bernstein, in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, and is subject of discussion in The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson et al.


(I will, however, add that in philosophy of physics, Qbism offers a compelling illustration of the perspectival nature of reality. This interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that the wave function does not represent an objective reality but rather encapsulates an observer's subjective degrees of belief about the outcomes of measurements. In Qbism, probabilities are personal and depend on the observer's knowledge and experiences, highlighting that reality is not a fixed, independent entity but is intertwined with the perspectives of individuals. This framework reinforces the idea that truth is not absolute but is inherently linked to the observer's viewpoint, emphasizing the integral role of the mind in constructing and understanding the world. Thus, Qbism aligns with the broader philosophical stance that perspective is crucial to the nature of reality, further undermining the possibility of an objective "view from nowhere." See A Private View of Quantum Reality.)

Yes, that is where we will indeed part ways, as far as the supernatural goes. I would replace your soteriology with catharsis. — schopenhauer1

Thank you for the compliment, I try not to violently disagree, even where I differ.

You know that the term ‘catharsis’ (and also ‘therapy’) both have religious roots, right? The Cathars were a powerful gnostic sect of the Langue’doc region (now southern France) in medievaldom. They were subject of a notorious act of mass slaughter by the Pope’s armies in the notorious Sack of Bezier in 1209 (wherein an entire town with all its inhabitants was set aflame, with the presiding general saying famously ‘Kill them all, God will know his own.)

Have a read of the Mind-Created World. I think it addresses your objections.

Humans have a self-awareness that no other animal has in that we can see this dissatisfaction play out in real time, and know its happening as we are living! — schopenhauer1

What I would point out is that the description of humans as 'animals' is very much part of the naturalist worldview (naturally!) It is taken to be an inevitable entailment of evolutionary biology, which displaced the supernatural accounts of creation. But then, there was a great deal attached to that supernatural account, including much of what was thought worth preserving from the Greek philosophical tradition. So, yes, we did evolve like other natural forms, but at a certain point a threshold was crossed which separates us from nature (and which I think is very likely the origin of the myth of the fall.) And I don’t know if naturalism has the depth to deal with it, not least because of the rigid and often unspoken barrier cordoning off anything it considers supernatural.

Incidentally - on the Judge Aileen Cannon case - as is well-reported, Cannon has made a series of questionable judgements about the classified documents charges, culminating in her decision to toss the case, on the basis that the Special Prosecutor was improperly appointed (judgement will be appealed.) I wonder if the real motivation in all this, is her unwillingness to face the possibility of actually being a judge in a case involving Trump. She is a demonstrably inexperienced justice who had hardly adjudicated an important case before being assigned this one (by a kind of ‘blind process’ as I underestand it.) So I wonder if it’s a possibility that she’s basically just chickened out. Anyone know if this is being considered a possible motive?

Repeating the lies isn’t going to make them any more real — NOS4A2

Something you’ve demonstrated every day for the last four years. Why anyone bothers with your nonsense is beyond me.

English, not American, — tim wood

Eastern bloc, I’ve always thought.

Isn’t there a sense in which an arithmetical proof offers a kind of certainty by virtue of the fact that it is ‘the terminus of explanation’? If any school child learning arithmetic asks ‘but why does ‘2 and 2 equal 4’?, the answer surely must be that ‘it just is’. It can’t be, and doesn’t need to be, explained further. ‘4’ is the terminus of explanation. I think what impressed the ancients is that this provides a kind of certainty which rarely avails in the world of human affairs, where everything is hedged about by conditions, by ifs and buts and ‘it depends’. Here you have a kind of pristine certainty that is close to unconditional. Furthermore, this certainty can be leveraged to great effect in the building of structures, the estimation of value, and so on and so forth. Not hard to see the charisma of arithmetic if you see it like that.

So maybe, in some sense, the demand that mathematics itself be explained is a bit like the child’s question. Mathematics, after all, is the source of a considerable number of explanations, not something that itself needs explaining. I’m reminded of the concluding paragraph of Wigner’s ‘ode to mathematics’:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. — The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Eugene Wigner

Meanwhile, news is in on Trump’s 90 minute ( :yikes: ) acceptance spiel. Apparently the first ten minutes was electrifying, the remainder just the usual mix of exaggerations, hyperbole, and lies. Business as usual, in other words. So much for Trump V2.0.

I don’t reckon she’s the candidate, and I also don’t reckon she would want to be. The Democratic Party has a lot of talent, let’s see who comes out of the Convention on 19th-21st August in Chicago. (I don’t think Kamala Harris has been bad in her role, but I just don’t think she’s what the electorate wants. Not that I have any credentials.)

The point is then, we are the species that needs the delusions to get by — schopenhauer1

That they are delusions are also a matter of conviction.

For anyone other than Trump supporters, it’s been a pretty terrible couple of months. I think what’s happening right at the moment, is that the Trump campaign has hired a couple of very savvy senior advisors, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who have persuaded him to drop all the crazy talk on the homestretch and pretend to be a principled politician. He’s learned from his first time in office and also won over some very powerful backers. There is a widespread belief that he has the election in the bag.

There are many dreadful things about the prospect of Trump winning, but chief amongst them is that the many lies he tells, and that his followers seem to swallow whole, will become baked into the record.

* He really won the 2020 election, which was rigged (even though 60 lawsuits attempting to prove it failed and it became subject of the largest defamation payout in American history.)
* Joe Biden is corrupt (even though a multi-year Congressional Oversight enquiry never found a shred of evidence)
* The January 6th assault on American democracy was either exaggerated or instigated by someone other than Trump
* The many recorded conversations of Trump threatening States Attorneys General to shake down votes don’t matter or mean anything
* That all the criminal indictments and civil cases brought against Trump were the consequences of deep state corruption.
*That Trump’s first term was something other than a schemozzle

Like, we’re all supposed to swallow these, and forget about the lies told and crimes likely committed. That lies will become the truth, and ‘alternative facts’ will prevail.

That the bad guys will have won.

Hopefully at the last, 51% of the electorate will see that, and vote accordingly.

…we are a species that has gone beyond the "balance of nature". — schopenhauer1

And as there is nothing beyond nature, we’re stepping off our own meta-cognitive awareness into the void of nothingness or meaninglessness. The best we can do, pace Camus, is bear it heroically. Fair description?

I recommend that Urs App book. Plus this one, on Google Books, very generous preview. Both provide insights into Schopenhauer the man.

Yes, so, just wondering what you would say about why Schopenhauer focused on pessimism as the correct attitude to profess towards the suffering of the world? — Shawn

It's a curious fact that Schopenhauer is categorised as atheist, when there are such obvious parallels between him and Indian philosophy (and also Stoic and Cynic philosophers). He verges on that rather cliched expression 'spiritual but not religious'. That quote I provided from Apps' book is fair representation of what his pessimism entails, but it's very different from the antinatalists and other modern secular existentialists that @schopenhauer1 often quotes from, who are nihilist in their outlook: natural life is a curse, but there's nothing beyond it.

Magee says in his book on Schopenhaur that his pessimism was more an aspect of his disposition than of his philosophy. Indeed, his philosophy shares many things in common with religious systems like Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which offer paths toward the successful reconciliation of human being with an ultimate reality; hardly a pessimistic message. So although Schopenhauer himself uses vocabulary that suggests a rather dark and despairing orientation toward the wold, one could accept all that Schopenhauer describes while still remaining sanguine. And indeed the biographical accounts of Schopenhauer indicate that the latter part of his life, he was an excellent conversationalist and had an active social life, not that of a dour, brooding philosopher.

But anyway, I think Schopenhauer's philosophy is certainly not a natural fit in secular culture - not because it's religious, or not in any kind of churchly sense, but because of his view that natural life is a kind of state of penance. That's worlds away from the modern view, that this life and the human condition are the only kinds there are.

Hey welcome Dan! I won't be submitting as it's not my area of interest, I'm just responding to say :clap:

I agree with every word, but it probably belongs in the Trump thread.

It seems the gig is up for Biden, he's going to announce 'the passing of the torch' this weekend (to put a positive spin on it.) For the time being, the nominee designate will probably remain Kamala Harris, but if the Democratic National Committee so decides, there will be an open convention beginning Aug 19th and another Presidential nominee might be chosen. Me, I don't think Kamala Harris would be a winning choice, but I can think of some. As I've said before, I think the electorate is crying out for an alternative to Trump v Biden, and if a credible candidate is presented, it might generate a big uptick.

I hope, anyway.

Maybe the ascetic life could contribute to such a 'better consciousness', or at least that is how I interpret it. — Shawn

As noted, he was a reader of the Upaniṣads. There are many similar passages in them e.g.

Chandogya Upanishad 8.12.1:

"In this imperishable realm, Brahman is manifest as pure consciousness, without any duality of subject and object. Whoever knows this enters into that state, becoming identical with it, attaining liberation."