Bear in mind, something having an infinite past is absurd too. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Why do you find that absurd, pray tell? What I (and most poll respondents) find counter intuitive is rather the idea of a possible begining and a possible end of time. The idea of an infinite past and future is perfectly fine.

I agree that the parts of what we think of as an apple do physically exist in the world. — RussellA

These parts are themselves wholes made of sub-parts.

This may be a bit odd maybe but Camille makes it work. A tentative translation follows.




Get up it's decided
Let me replace you
I will take your pain
Slowly without making a sound
As we wake up the rain
I will take it your pain

She fights she struggles
But won't resist
I will block the elevator
Sabotage the switch
I will take your pain

But who is this squatter
This storm before the summer
Dirty bitch of a little sister?
I'm going to confiscate everything
Her darts and her whistle
I will spank her
Kick her out of recess
I will take your pain

But who is this heiress
Who bathes, who lies down
In the lukewarm water of your loins?
I will take away her dessert
Make her bite the dust
Of all those who have nothing left
Of all those who are no longer hungry
I will take your pain

Tell me that science gives a fuck
To when, this bridge between our bellies?
If it hurts where you're afraid
It doesn't hurt where I'm thinking!

What does this bitch want?
Her cake and eat it too?
That you live or that you die?
She must die of happiness
Get a new pair of shoes
She must be overflown with flowers
Change color
I'm going to play the doctor
I will take your pain

Tell me that science gives a fuck
To when, this bridge between our bellies?
If it hurts where you're afraid
It doesn't hurt where I'm singing!

Get up, stand up
She wants you

Laws exist and these will be broken/violated if nonphysical minds interact, causally, with physical systems. — Agent Smith

What substance are your laws made of?

What are objects
The whole is the relationship between its parts
An object such as an apple is the relationship between its parts
The parts of an an apple have a physical existence in the world.
The question is, does the whole, the object, the apple, have an ontological existence in the world. — RussellA

Note that the parts of an apple, eg its flesh, its seed or its skin, are themselves made of smaller parts (cells) themselves made of smaller parts (biochemical structures) etc. etc. It's the same dialectic of wholes and their parts all the way down. So if apples do not exist on account of being wholes, nothing exists.

Therefore, relations objectively exist in this world.

For example, there must be an ontological relation between my pen and the Eiffel Tower, between an apple in France and an orange in Spain, between a particular atom in the Empire State Building and a particular atom in the Taj Mahal - none of which makes sense. — RussellA

It makes perfect sense. In Newtonian physics, an atom in the Taj Mahal must by necessity attract an atom in the Empire State Building, though the resulting force is I guess extremely small. In General Relativity, everything is relative -- relative to everything else I would think.

Olivier5 Comment vas-tu ?
A fair translation ? — Amity

Sorry Amity, I haven't been on TPF much lately. Yes, it's as fair a translation as can be. :-)

I love the growing complicity between Paradis and Moreau on the first vid, how they start the song far away from one another, and end it holding hands.

A touch of color perhaps? This improbable Caribbean princess is Liliana "Li" Saumet from Colombian band Bomba Estéreo.


Ahora, by Bomba Estéreo



I'm here
I'm sitting in the right place
At the right moment, at the right time
Let your heart open
And repeat this mantra:
"I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine"

Here the sky merges with the sea
The wounds started to come out
Carrying what must be carried
I can walk barefoot through the sand
And I can hear the sound of your voice
I can see the brightness of all the stars
And in all of them, see myself
I can swim deep deep inside
In the inside sea, as when missing you
And in these depths find my center
And then I feel like you're here
I'm good
Now
I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine

The wind smells fresh, smells like salt
Marks will remain on the skin
Where soul and body will unite
I can imagine that you feel what I feel
With a thought, everything can change
Everything in this life has its time
Even them, I dream, will get it
It can get you up in the morning
And look at the 'cute' things in front of you
The green sunrise of the jungle
So that I know you are here
I am here, you are here, I am here now
I am here, you are here, I am here now

That’s what makes a joke of the essay linked to the OP. — Wayfarer

Yes. Greater exposure to the phenomenology tradition (beside Heidi) would help this place methinks. I mean, lets recognise pretheoretical human experience of being at the world (semi-)consciously as the primary condition and locus for science, as the source of all knowledge that one may tentatively built about the world, including scientific knowledge.

I am curious why Descartes only used thought to prove existence, and not feeling, which would seem to be a more obvious route. — RussellA

Because of the idea that even sense data (pain) could be deceiving, or doubted for the sake of the argument.

Even if Aristotle's Theory of Universals was true - whereby universals are understood by the intellect as only existing where they are instantiated in objects or things - the intellectual processing of information into concepts, such as tables and governments, can still be explained within materialism. — RussellA

It can be explained, but not explained away. It cannot be ignored, i e. a government or some multiplication table still matter within materialism. Or if you prefer, the only logical form of materialism is non-eliminative. Materialists have feelings too.

Armstrong describes his philosophy as a form of scientific realism.

....The ultimate ontology of universals would only be realised with the completion of physical science.'

Good luck with that :rofl: — Wayfarer

That made me laugh, as I wondered: will the guy who completes physical science get all the Nobel prizes thereafter, year after year, or will they cancel the Nobel prizes once science is finished? ;-)

Nevertheless, and his naïve view of science as "finishable" notwithstanding, Amstrong here recognises the fundamental dualism of science: one does need to use universal laws and universal concepts to do science.

As I was trying to say upthread, geology is not a stone. It's not even a stone collection. It's a set of theories about stones.

:starstruck:

my main point with that example of unicorns as existent thoughts was the absurdity of stipulating that there can be "existent physical things that are not physically real". I'll stand by the absurdity of this till evidenced wrong. — javra

I agree that to try and categorize thoughts as 'physical' leads to seeming absurdities. This form of monism is simply a category error.

Logically speaking, if some things are deemed physical, then it follows that some other things are not to be deemed physical, or the terms 'physical' means everything and nothing...

If one says: "Everything is red" or "Everything is a triangle", or "Everything sucks", then the question arises: what do "red", "triangle" or "sucks" mean in these sentences? What work do they do?

the last sentence might imply to some that physicalism does offer a fully coherent view of the world. It doesn't. — javra

Good point.

The whole problem of 'scientism' can be seen as treating human being as an object while simultaneously overlooking or denying the centrality of the subjective nature of perception. — Wayfarer

A point Husserl made well, and a great contribution to philosophy IMO.

There is the subjective pole of experience, which is the condition of consciousness, in other words, it must be conscious before any experience. Knowing-being, you could call it. I'm sure it is real even in primitive organisms but only the subject of rational analysis in man (also something Schopenhauer says). — Wayfarer

Yes to this. When I speak of other animal species' potential conscious experience and subjectivity, I am not saying it is equal to ours, obviously it's not. I am just saying biology gives us no reason to believe that other animals than Homo sapiens totally lack self-awareness. On the contrary, evolution theory tells us that changes come very gradually, that new species recycle much of what older species have or do, that true radical novelty is extremely rare in evolution.

So it is quite improbable biologically speaking that dogs, cats or chimpanzees be p-zombies. They are not that far from us, you can bet they have feelings too.

That is what I regard as the nature of 'being'. Notice the word - be-ing. It's a verb, denoting an act. (Somehow this strikes me as significant.) — Wayfarer

I am a big fan of Aristotle on this: being is an all-encompassing category and therefore, there can be no science of being. For any science needs to focus on a type of object to study. Granted that in phenomenology, being is not meant as the being of everything and nothing, but precisely focused on us, human beings. On how it feels to be a human at the world.

To study being in this sense is to study the human fate so to speak, aka our human existence and toil here on earth, phenomenologically.

That is still a very broad scope. The project of all philosophy I suppose.

C.S. Lewis statement that 'the doors of hell are locked from the inside.' — Wayfarer

That's a keeper.

those beastly Christians and Muslims — Wayfarer

I wonder why they always exclude Jews from this blanket condemnation... Isn't Yahweh a bitch too? :-)

It's as if the virus has a(n) (invisible) brain that's strategizing, thinking about what's its next best move.
— Agent Smith

That's more or less the core of my question. — dimosthenis9

Just like a computer can win a chess game. No will needs apply.

This idea is the subject of an interesting lecture by Michel Bitbol, philosopher of science, It is never known, but it is the knower. — Wayfarer

That Bitbol lecture is a blast, but it does not argue for the impossibility of self-knowledge. Rather, it argues that one must recognize the knower as a condition for knowledge, that it is necessary to put back the human mind at the heart of any human knowledge, rather than try and abstract of it.

Against Schophehauer apparently, I would think that self-awareness is a key feature of the mind. There's a mise en abîme somewhere there, and one of my favorite hypotheses is that our two brains produce such an effect by perceiving one another.

That's not to say that it is easy to know oneself. It is in fact very hard, due to the issues that Bitbol and your Buddhist text raise. But not impossible.

I'm in agreement with this, and is what I basically maintained in the context of this thread in regard to the mind and its contents. That it's absurd to maintain that "the idea that a unicorn, being an existent thought, is a mass / physical energy endowed physical thing that is not real" is one of the (acknowledgedly minor) points I somewhere hereabouts previously made. The point wasn't addressed. — javra

Okay then, sorry if I misunderstood your argument. Unicorns don't exist on planet earth other than as a human fantasy -- though we can't rule out that they might 'exist for real' elsewhere in this vast universe -- so the question seems to be: how many Joules for a dream?

That strikes me as the wrong scale. Fantasies are not measurable this way, but they do exist on a different 'plane' or 'world' than that of matter and energy. That's where dualism (or pluralism) is "truer" or better than monism: it helps depict our reality in a more efficient and useful manner. Unlike any type of monism, pluralist philosophies try to recognise the diversity and complexity of our experience. They don't try to put square pegs into round holes. I suppose their disadvantage is that they don't offer a fully coherent view of the world.

Many things appear to exist, that do not consist of "physical energy". For instance: space, time, the surface area of a cube, the direction of a movement, a hole in the ground, an angle, 1 million dollars, the law of excluded middle, a novel, or the formula "e = mc^2". — Olivier5

Thinking about these examples of things that appear to exist but are not made of energy or matter, some of them (the surface area of a cube, the direction of a movement, a hole in the ground, an angle) can be defined as "morphological or "topological". They are shapes, i.e. forms. They are about how material things are configured. There's something objective in them. E.g. you can fall in a hole and die; the exposed surface of a rock does gets eroded faster than the inside, an inertial object does maintain its direction of movement, etc. They belong to what Popper called World 1: the set of material things and the shapes they take.

Other items in the list could be labelled "cultural": money, a scientific or logical law, a novel. Cultural objects exist in human societies, as beliefs, ideas, works of art, conventions and norms that are enforced, eg by police and tribunals, through scientific peer review, or by some other social mechanism. They belong what Popper called World 3: cultural objects, such as novels (not the paper and ink objects that are part of world 1, but the text, the novel itself).

In between World 1 and World 3, Popper placed the world of human thoughts, World 2. World 1 underpins World 2, which underpins World 3.

(In my own version of this pluralist view, the world of biology (living organisms) deserves a 'World', and Popper's Worlds 2 and 3 are rather similar so I lump them together and personally count the following 3 'worlds': 1) unanimated matter, 2) biology / life, 3) private thoughts and cultural/socially shared thoughts and objects.)

Evidently, life is a prerequisite for thoughts and societies, so thus defined, world 2 still underpins world 3.

These 'Worlds' are just categories of things in existence, not 'substances' nor 'properties' (whatever those words mean, which isn't clear to me). And there are obvious relationships and connections between 'worlds'. The point of postulating three 'worlds' is simply to assert the existence of non material things, such as the novel Pride and Prejudice. But even in the material world, things have shapes, and shapes have no weight, although they can be measured otherwise, eg they might have a volume.

By and large yes, and thus the existence of minds cannot be denied. That's the cogito.

If the mind is physical, then thoughts are physical. If a thought is physical, it consists of physical energy. If physical energy can be validly quantified as e = mc^2, then our physical thoughts, which consist of structured physical energy, then consist of physical mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. Ergo, our physical thoughts have physical mass.

Where's the logical fallacy in this? — javra

In "If a thought is physical, it consists of physical energy." There is no justification given, and it simply does not follow. Many things appear to exist, that do not consist of "physical energy". For instance: space, time, the surface area of a cube, the direction of a movement, a hole in the ground, an angle, 1 million dollars, the law of excluded middle, a novel, or the formula "e = mc^2".

People can speak of substance dualism, property dualism or monism untill they are blue in the face, but the truth is that nobody knows what constitutes a mind, yet. So let's not jump to conclusions.

Only minds can discuss, though.

What I can relate to, is the idea that forms exist universally and have causal efficacy. There is no matter without form (and vice versa). By "form" I mean the actual shapes that things take, not abstract forms.

Life appears to build on this, to be about form management, so to speak. Life uses codes, including hormones and DNA and all that jazz. And many species can collect and analyse information through neuronal networks. In this sense life -- even primitive life -- is already a language, a logos, and also a game. Almost a philosophy?

I simply think the mental and matter are connected, like the charge of an electron is attached to it, contained in it, or is a property of it. — Raymond

That's panpsychism, too iffy for my taste.

Oxford introductory bibilography to contemporary hylomorphism. — Wayfarer

Good resource. I note with interest:

"Jaworski, William. Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind: How Hylomorphism Solves the Mind-Body Problem. Oxford University Press, 2016" - "Argues that structure or form is a first-order explanatory principle [and] that endorsing this position provides the necessary metaphysical tools to solve various versions of the mind/body problem ...."

Seems close to my own intuitions.

Reality is what we think. A physicist sees fields of particles, a pantheist sees conscious entities everywhere, and a dualist like myself sees both approaches (not to an independent reality, in case you might think I contradict myself covertly...) combined., i.e, the basic ingredients of reality possess mental charge, as well as material properties. That's a different kind of dualism, I guess. — Raymond

Isn't it simply a displacement (or universalisation) of the classical Cartesian human mind vs matter 'divide', in direction of panpsychism?

This leaves reality out of reach forever. The interpretation, the theory is the reality. — Raymond

You contradict yourself here, it seems to me.

My original point was that it is an error to consider science as anti-dualist. Individual scientists might be monist, if they care enough about confused metaphysics, but science itself requires no such monism. In fact, science AS A METHOD, is structurally dualist in that it combines facts and theories. No science without theory, and theory is thought. Science cannot devalue human thought without devaluing itself. And science cannot deny the existence of a thought-independent world out there. Otherwise all sciences would be but branches of psychology.

Epistemic distinction, not ontic "divide". — 180 Proof

Epistemic divide.

Why should that knowledge be imperfect? — Raymond

Because of the epistemic divide I am talking about. Any knowledge is an interpretation, and any interpretation involves an epistemic jump. The map is not the territory.

If this were so, it seems to me, natural agents could not have any "knowledge of nature" — 180 Proof

And de facto, our knowledge of nature is always imperfect and provisional, to the extent that some philosopher once opined that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing.

a map, like an analogy, is an abstraction of formal aspects of the territory derived from some concrete aspects of the territory that is used to survey delineate and interpret some other concrete aspects of the territory (origami or "rhizomatic"-like); therefore, only in the sense of property dualism, Oliver, do I agree with you. — 180 Proof

If that works for you, why not? To me the idea of "property dualism" means very little, just like the term "substance dualism" by the way. "Dualism" is clear enough for my taste, though.

In any case, it remains a fact that science implies a fundamental divide between nature as it is and our knowledge of nature. And thus it implies a duality. A scientific theory is inherently different from the part of nature it tries to model. For instance, the current theory of evolution is different from the actual evolution of life on this planet. The latter is a process that took billions of year to unfold, while the former can be understood, mastered and taught by anyone, given a little effort.

Likewise, geology = logos about the earth and its minerals <> the earth and minerals themselves. Geology is not a stone.

How does that warrant your statement that "a dualist point of view is essential to science"? — 180 Proof

I count two things: a logos on the one hand, and the material thing the logos is about on the other hand. Note that these two things are inherently apart, the map being by necessity always different from the territory.

In fact, a dualist point of view is essential to science.
— Olivier5
How so? — 180 Proof

Science is a logos about matter.

The article misrepresents science as a saying anything certain about the soul. In fact, a dualist point of view is essential to science.

Who is Graziano, and what bits if his writings have you read?

TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN

January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.

By Barton Gellman
DECEMBER 6, 2021

.........

An unpunished plot is practice for the next.

Donald trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. .........

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/

I share the OP's feeling of a world disappearing.

According to The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, a novel by Jérôme Ferrari, men do not necessarily notice a big or sudden change when their world crumbles. (By "a world" he means some structured polity making some philosophical sense to its members -- a self-meaningful society, not the physical world). Sometimes they do not even notice anything, and they keep living without a world around them. So Romans kept living once Rome was no more.

It's a complex book, relating the slow decomposition of a charming universe created around a village bar managed by two young friends in Corsica. This is presented in a historical perspective, with the collapse of the French colonial empire as well as that of the Roman empire always in the background. The book chapters are titled after sentences taken from The City of God of Augustine, and in particular his Sermon on the fall of Rome, pronounced after the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410.

They didn't grow a real back hole though, but a fake one according to your linked article. Not sure what that is.

If so why can't we replicate it? — TheQuestion

Because it involves a singularity, the big crunch. How would you do that in a lab? Create a small back hole and see what happens?

Jumping from the Roman world to the Greek — Primperan

You jumped first by mentioning Thrasymachus.

What you define as philosophy belongs to a very specific discourse, the Christian one. — Primperan

That made no sense. I haven't defined philosophy quite yet and there is more than one single Christian discourse.

You manipulate the historical discourse to your liking. — Primperan

I have the greatest respect for history and would never do that. You on the other hand seems like a peddler of alternative historical narratives. Like the ridiculous idea that pagans in antiquity had no moral concern.

Weren't Socrates and Plato mostly interested in ethics? Aristotle would say that ethics is what defines man as man, and that without it we're just like any other species. It is pretty obvious from these examples alone that the ancients had moral concerns and debated them widely.