I recall having a long argument with Banno about whether the intentionality in saccades counts as a form of belief that wasn't propositional (I argued that it was), so that might be another point of tension with someone who's quite strict about the relationship of mental content to statements and truth conditions. — fdrake

Would the intentionality in saccades best be called 'belief' or 'expectation'? Regardless of that, would it not be the case that such expectations or beliefs, although not present to consciousness in propositional form, could be rendered as such?

When I retired I moved from Sydney to near Nimbin on 15 acres. I would like to let others live on the property, to share what the land has to offer and some of the workload maintaining it. It's two thirds forest, but a lot of weeds, and the rest needs mowing/ slashing. So, I've thought about more communal living, but it's not easy; what happens if you come to dislike the people sharing the land with you?

What about house and land, as in principal place of dwelling?

I'm just saying: between planetary eugenics and the end of private property, one of these stands out as far more harmful than the other. — StreetlightX

Yes, I am totally opposed to eugenics. I feel some resistance towards giving up my own property, but if everyone was on board I'd go along with it, I suppose.

It'd be communal lunch I'd imagine. — StreetlightX

Not sure if I can make it, :wink:

Could we discuss this matter? Why are some immoral acts not crimes? Perhaps because they aren't ones that endanger other people's health, life, and property. It appears that morality is an even more restrictive (oppressive?) set of rules than the law. It doesn't make sense to talk of Draconian laws then, right? — Agent Smith

Some acts are considered immoral for entirely religious reasons. As modern secular people we are not so much inclined to accept religious reasoning about moral issues. As social beings anything which would disrupt social harmony to a significant enough degree would be naturally thought of as immoral, it seems to me. It's really a hugely complex issue shot through with all kinds of subtleties and nuances.

Just saying this doesn't make it true. — StreetlightX

Yes, I could be wrong about that of course. I acknowledge I am speaking from within my own limited imagination.

Although I am not averse to eating just one single billionare just for funsies and as an example. — StreetlightX

While I would have no moral objection; I don't think I could overcome my aversion at the thought of consuming human flesh.

The finite medium where these inscriptions are (stored)? Maybe your confusing memories with memory. Recalled from where? — Harry Hindu

If neuroscience shows that memories consist in neural structures, which are not static, but dynamic and changing, then, as @Joshs said, memory is a matter of bringing what is encoded in those structures to consciousness. But since they are dynamic, the process would seem to be, at least to some degree, reconstructive.

"It's not practical to end capitalism so mass planetary eugenics and human ecocide is all we're capable of".

No. — StreetlightX

I haven't said that. I'm only talking about what I can envision, but I'm not very smart, and I'm very open to other ideas and possibilities. But no one (that I know) seems to be presenting actionable possibilities.

So, it seems to me that even if we could, even if we were willing to, immediately end capitalism, that it would involve a great deal of suffering and death. That might just be the best thing for humanity long term, but if it involves a great deal of suffering and death, then it is morally unacceptable, so what to do?

At this point, humanity is not guaranteed to be able to find a way out that involves little suffering and death, as unacceptable as that may seem.

The LNC is the foundation of classical comprehensibility; it's a litmus test for sense as opposed to nonsense. Nonsense is a much broader concept (incoherence is a bigger world than mere inconsistency). — Agent Smith

Sure, but my point was that our experience of the empirical world is completely consistent with the the LNC. Our logic might be different if our world had been logically different; if things could be black and white all over simultaneously, for example. Seems impossible I know. But does it seem impossible to us because it really is metaphysically impossible, or do we see it as logically impossible because our world is the way it is?

That's a dumb aim. It's ought to be change our patterns of consumption so that we don't end life on the planet as we know it. — StreetlightX

I agree, but a solution to that problem doesn't seem to be in the offing.

Our measures of "the world economy" are basically rigged bullshit geared towards the growth of corporations and the valorization of capital. Being held hostage to shitty measures of economic growth is not a reason to commit mass ecocide. — StreetlightX

Again I agree, but achieving de-growth, which seems to be essential at this stage, does not appear to be possible without collapsing the current system. Collapsing the current system is probably a very good idea, but it would involve untold human suffering; and it is always those at the bottom of the food chain who get thrown under the bus first, and that is inhumane, so—where does that leave us in practical terms?

This is your brain on capitalism. No, it would not. Curtialment of business practises under capitalism in which waste, excess, and low cost manfacturing is a necessity would result in immense human suffering. In fact, it already results in immense human suffering. What is needed is a change in the way we structure our economy, not systematic world ecocide. — StreetlightX

This is just nice words unless you can outline a comprehensive and actionable plan for such a radical change. I've never seen anything approaching that. I'm all for the destruction of the evil that is capitalism, but I can't envision any way to do it without collapsing the infrastructures which have been built on the foundations of capitalism.

And even if a practicable way were imaginable; I can't see the populace acquiescing, given that we are all wedded to our lifestyles and current levels of prosperity.

Idk if you've been paying attention but there are these things called fossil fuels which we need to keep in the ground. There is also this thing called capitalism which we need to end for good. In fact the former is premised on the latter. It takes a tragic lack of imagination to imagine that eugenics programs rather than changing the economy is the solution to climate change. Green fascism is still fascism. — StreetlightX

I'm talking about the problems faced, not advocating anything, least of all "eugenics programs". For example to transition from the massive infrastructure based on fossil fuels to "green technologies" cannot be achieved overnight; it will take decades (even if the political will were one hundred percent there).

If I wanted to check where my understanding of JTB was confused on this matter, I'd return to the text, or just ask someone in the Philosophy department. — Isaac

Perhaps I didn't express it well. I meant that you seem confused about what I am saying about JTB, evidenced by your objections seeming to be irrelevant. Also it seems obvious to me from my general experience of talking with people and observing how they view knowledge and truth, as manifested in their discourse and actions, that JTB is the default understanding.

They subsequently came to believe it's a sphere. They could still be wrong. They believe it to be a sphere using exactly the same fundamental process those who believed it to be flat used - justification. We've not gained some magic additional access. We just have much, much better justifications than the flat-earthers had. — Isaac

Right, but I've already said that knowledge, as it is generally understood, is defeasible. This is an example of what I meant when I referred to your "confusion"; presenting an objection as though it is a problem for the JTB understanding, when it really isn't, makes it seem that you are confused about it.

In any case, the earth has been observed and imaged from space, from satellites, and we can see that it is a sphere, so the likelihood of that observation being wrong is minuscule. That is not magical, but it is a paradigm leap to be able to observe the Earth from space.

Then we'd be in no better boat. No-one would use the word knowledge because everyone would be quite aware that they could not demonstrate their belief was 'truly' justified. Since we do use the word knowledge, it must be some other threshold that we mean by it. — Isaac

It's not a matter of demonstrating anything. The point is only that to the degree that we can be confident that our justifications are based on true observations, the degree to which we can be confident that our beliefs are true is commensurate, and that is what is generally meant by claiming to have knowledge.

None of this changes the fact that we can never be absolutely sure we possess knowledge. I think the idea of dropping the 'true' part is fine if you are also happy with dropping the 'knowledge' part. Then we would never claim to have knowledge at all, but merely beliefs which seem more or less justified, or not justified at all, depending on what we take to be the criteria for saying what constitutes evidence. — Janus


How odd. You're so wedded to a particular definition that you'd rather we just never use the word than admit that since we do use the word, the definition must be wrong. Is that how you see the rest of language working. Some philosophers decide what the definition really is and and if we're not using it right then we don't get to use the word at all, they'll just take their ball home if we're not going to play by their rules? — Isaac

.Again, it's not what I said. I didn't say I want to drop the "true" part. I said if you want to drop the true part, then you could still talk in terms of beliefs instead of knowledge. This would equate to some kind of coherentism, I suppose. Beliefs would never be true, or constitute knowledge; we would just feel entitled to have more confidence in them the more they cohered with our overall understanding of things as presented in the various sciences and everyday commonsense.

It's not something I'm advocating.

Overpopulation narratives are just eugenic fascism for the well-off. — StreetlightX

That's a facile dismissal. I read the articles, and while I agree that "first world" people contribute many times more emissions per capita than so-called "third world" populations, that is not the only or even the most salient point. The avowed aim of corporations and governments is to bring poorer countries up to a first world level of prosperity and consumerism. And that would be only fair, right? ( And good for the capitalists as well :wink: ).

The problem is that to achieve that, or even just to keep feeding the current population adequately will involve continuing habitat destruction, species extinctions, depletion of water resources, salination of soils, destruction of soils by industrial farming, destruction of marine life, and so on. The more the humans get the less for the rest of the inhabitants of our little planet, and ultimately disaster for the humans too.

It'd be great if we could simply get rid of three quarters of the population, and that would be far more effective if it was three quarters of the first world population. But what would happen then? The world economy would collapse. There'd be no more aid, exports or travel to, or exploitation of, third world countries. They would be left to their own devices.

Any curtailment of business as usual would involve immense human suffering, so we seem to be riding a juggernaut that cannot be stopped without catastrophe for the humans. But continual growth is unsustainable and is very quickly approaching catastrophe anyway, so either way it's catastrophe. It's a hard fact to face, but seems inevitable unless someone can come up with a magic solution. Can you imagine any?

Perhaps not, but there are acts which are considered by some to be moral infractions which are not illegal; so there is no equivalence.

You seem to be conflating moral injunctions and the law.

Acting in line with them makes one a loser. — baker

O loser of what?

I can only agree! Liked the poem; I'll have to check out the 'important Book'.

I don't see a problem for those who believe consciousness is physical in the fact that the physical events are experienced.

My own view is that 'physical' and 'mental' are mutually incommensurable bases of explanation. I don't see any reason to posit a transcendent "realm".

Memory is no longer thought of as storage but instead as reconstructive process. — Joshs

Right, that makes sense: so memories are reconstructed from traces, which do not remain unchanged in the process of reconstruction.

Overpopulation is a not a problem and we can feed the world twice over if we needed to. — StreetlightX

Only because of continual destruction of wild habitat, unsustainable industrial farming and ravaging of the fisheries. Industrial farming relies on fossil fuels both for its fertilizers and for its harvesting machinery, Modern intensive fishing practices also rely on fossil fuels, And then you have the problem of how to transport all that food around the planet, without using fossil fuels.

I would ask Dennett and his ilk Rorty's question: how does anything out there get in here? Of course, the "in here' part is the brain, and Dennett thinks the brain is simply this organ, like a liver or a kidney, that produces consciousness, but answer Rorty's question and you end up with the very troublesome conclusion that consciousness is PRESUPPOSED by talk about brains.
This is where Dennett's thinking turns tail and runs. — Astrophel

I don't see that consciousness being presupposed, as it might be said to be by all human discourse, would be a problem for Dennett, since he doesn't deny its existence.

Sure it is. Is not memory a container of information? — Harry Hindu

Not as I understand it.

You're confusing data (inscriptions in memory) with memory. — Harry Hindu

I think memory, in one sense, just is the totality of "inscriptions", In another sense we could say it is the faculty of being able to recall those "inscriptions" to consciousness. No "container" to be found or required.

I'm saying he pretended to have no hands (and so on). I'm unsure how to make this any clearer. He entertained a faux doubt--he feigned doubt--for the purpose of justifying the fact he never had any doubt in the first place. — Ciceronianus

OK, I don't know if you have read Descartes, but you seem to fairly thoroughly misunderstand his project. I don't know what else to say to you about it, so I guess I'll leave it there.

I don't think the 'container' analogy is really a good way of understanding memory. Thinking of memory as consisting in traces or patterns. like marks left in the sand, seems more apt to me.

but now we're distinguishing ourselves not just from machines but from animals that don't have language. Lacking our higher mental capacities, their behavior is, insofar as it is instinctive, mechanical.

But I think that's wrong. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, I do too. It seems to me our difference from machines is one of kind, whereas our differences from the other animals are differences of degrees.

For everything living, food matters, threats, shelter, offspring, and thus these things have meaning, and there is the potential for their environment to be a meaningful world, something that could be understood. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I'm always nonplussed by the claim that the fact/ value distinction is ontologically robust; the way I view it is that it is only when take an artificially distanced, abstracted view of the world that it could appear as devoid of value and meaning. Animals' environments are as replete with meanings for them as ours are for us. Our meanings are no doubt more elaborate, on account of our ability to symbolize, but perhaps they are less vital, more attenuated, for that. Human exceptionalism seems to be a curse—for the other animals, but for humans as well.

There's plainly an 'affinity' between natural science and the mechanical, as an object of knowledge, which might not quite define the limits of possible science. Don't care. I think there's a similar 'affinity' between philosophy and the meaningful. Whether it's possible for them to meet in the middle is not my concern; I'll be arriving from the meaning side. — Srap Tasmaner

Nicely put: I relate strongly to that disposition. We don't have, for fear of disgracing ourselves by proposing anything which would appear to be nonsense from that science-driven point of view, to confine our intellectual lives to what accords with the kind of third person views of ourselves that science enables, .

It doesn't need to be mentioned but for the sake of clarity and arguendo,

The Fundamental Principle of Epistemology: The universe makes sense (logically).

Logically in the classical sense (categorical, sentential, predicate logic), the key premise being the law of noncontradiction (LNC) can't be violated!

I'm concerned because there seems to be no deductive proof for The Fundamental Principle of Epistemology.

Why should the universe (1) make sense (2) to us? — Agent Smith

The universe does make sense to us. I'm not sure the question as to why it should make sense to us makes sense. If the universe didn't make sense to us we would not be able to live. which of course means we would not be able to ask the question as to why the universe should makes sense.

As to the LNC, if something was both black and white all over, that would be a contradiction. But we never see anything like that. Such things seem ontically impossible, and if that's true then the phenomenal world is a world of non-contradiction.

Like "pretending," "imagining" something to be the case isn't believing it to be the case. — Ciceronianus

That's right; he never believed he had no hands, but recognized that the belief that he had hands was not ineliminable across the whole range of imaginable scenarios; whereas the belief that he had beliefs was ineliminable across all imaginable scenarios. I'm struggling to see what your point has been. Are you accusing him of disingenuously pretending to honestly believe he had no hands, or what?

I don't know what that means. Janus wrote

"

If thoughts were disconnected (if there was no underlying logic of their associations and relations) we would have nothing. So there is formal, rule-based logic, — Janus — T Clark

I meant that ideas find their meaning in contexts, in their relations and associations with other ideas. It's not all formal, rule based logic, but poetry. for example has its own logic; if it didn't it would be unintelligible, a string of disconnected random ideas. with no overall context or associative "glue" to bind them together.

I think you are missing the point. Descartes was able to imagine a scenario in which the existence of his hands (to stick to the example) could be subject to doubt. His whole life as he presently remembers and experiences it might be a dreamed confabulation, or a delusion visited on him by the ED, and so on. These are not serious everyday doubts we might have but radical thought experiment scenarios which Descartes takes to clarify just what could, in extremis, be doubted, and what could not.

If you and others believe he really thought he had no hands, or eyes, or nose, or ears, and that an Evil Demon was having a joke at his expense, then by all means say so. If you don't believe he thought that, but nonetheless said he would assume that was true, have the kindness to say that as well. — Ciceronianus

The point is Descartes did not believe he had no hands etc. He found himself capable of doubting he had hands etc, on the strength of the possibility that he might be dreaming, it might be a trick played on him by the ED and so on. He went through the process of identifying everything he could possibly doubt in order to see what he could not possibly doubt. — Janus

I re-post this, which you (perhaps conveniently?) failed to respond to previously.

A minor gladness in proportion to our agreement I assume?

And what we have at hand indicates that god is evil. — Banno

The gnostics beleived that the 'god' (actually a minor arrogant and deluded demiurge who imagined himself omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent) who created this imperfect world was himself flawed through and through. They called him "Yaldabaoth" if my memory serves.

Or perhaps question _our_ ideas of virtue? — baker

What do you find questionable about the common ideas of virtue?

So it is really both ways: the world creates us and we create the world. — Gregory

Yes, this is like the Buddhist idea of interdependent co-arising.

I'm an enlightenment assurance denier, and an enlightenment deflationary. I think enlightenment consists in transformation of the way of being, i.e. non-reactivity, not in any special propositional knowledge.

BTW, I looked at the wiki page you linked and it deals with the sense of 'enlightenment' which is not under discussion so, unimpeachable as it might be in its domain; it is irrelevant here.

The manner in which you're conducting this discussion is part of the discussion. — baker

And the manner in which you, etc....no shit!

OK, I wasn't aware of that, thanks.

For us, subjectively speaking, the self, understood as the experiencer (and the doer) is the basis of "all this". Without experiencers the world would not appear at all. We can take a more detached scientific perspective and say the world is more basic since the self is born into a pre-existing world. These are two imaginable perspectives; how do we decide between them? Do we need to claim that one or the other is the "true" perspective? Or should we not deploy whichever perspective is the more useful for the task at hand?

:smirk: Good onya an unimpeachable source to be sure!

:cool: I'm glad you enjoyed it Emdubbyadubbya!

I contend that such interpersonal verifiability among epistemic peers within a specialized field of knowledge applies also to religion/spirituality. While Janus thinks that I am deluded to think this way. Perhaps he thinks this way also about doctors, engineers, musicians, atheletes, anyone who has expertise in a specialized field of knowledge ... — baker

I haven't seen any explanation as to how their could be determinable inter-subjective confirmation re religious experience, or any other kind of subjective experience and judgement (aesthetics). In the sciences there are theories that generate predictions and observations which make those predictions, if confirmed, seem more likely to confirm the soundness of the theories that produced them. But this doesn't constitute any kind of absolute certainty. I don't see why it should be thought that there could be more certainty with religion/ spirituality; if anything for the reasons I go into below, I think it should be thought that there must be less certainty in this domain. If you have an argument I'm ready to listen to it.

In regard to everyday observations of the world it is easy to check if everybody is observing the same thing. We all see the sun come up, the rain fall, the traffic streaming on the roads, the people in the streets, and so on. So, there is far more certainty in this domain of visual perception than in either science or religion. Although that said science (and religion and everything we do) relies on this confirmably shared visual field in order to even get off the ground. Religious experience, since the experiences in question are not directly publicly shareable, but can only be described, is not directly determinable as to its veracity or level of "spirituality" or whatever you want to call it. But as I said, if you have an alternative argument or explanation, please present it.

I never thought of Descartes in terms of synthetic priori judgments, and I don't really understand how this would work. How does this go? — Astrophel

I generally agree with what you said. It seems to me the "cogito" is a synthetic a priori judgment.