You don't need to educate me about Covid trust me on that ;) — I like sushi

You're not showing any knowledge or intelligence on the subject, so why should I believe you don't need to be educated?

People shouldn't be effectively forced to put something into their bodies. This is the law for all vaccinations. — I like sushi

Nobody is being forced except provisionally; that is if you want to do X. The choice is still yours. In any case, why shouldn't People be expected to join in the community and effort and put something into their bodies when there is only a tiny risk to them personally? If you don't want to take the risk along with the rest, then you have the option of not coming into contact with people at all; so the choice is still yours. By the way the case fatality rate for Covid still stands at around 2%, making it about ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu. That said, this situation shows that there is a strong moral argument for getting vaccinated against seasonal flu too. Something good may yet come out of the covid pandemic.

I think that’s a pretty poor argument anyway. If other people have taken the vaccine then the chances of the, getting infected and dying are very very small. — I like sushi

Other people can still get infected and although their risk of hospitalization or dying is greatly reduced there is still a risk. Also if they have a breakthrough infection and then infect others who are vaccinated the chances that someone will be hospitalized or die increase. Being vaccinated is such a minor thing to do for the sake of those you are close to and the community as a whole that there is no good argument for refusing vaccination. Given that, any reduction of risk to others is a good argument for being vaccinated. Not to be vaccinated is simply a selfish act unless you have a good reason not to be, end of story.

Thanks Josh, I like and agree with what Gendlin seems to be saying in those quotes. Being a lover of poetry I agree that there is no end to the possibilities of experience and its expressions. But poetic expression is as much a cultural elaboration as it is an individual exploration.

Should we call poetic expression knowledge, though? Not in the propositional sense I would say, but I think it can be knowledge in the sense I have spoken of before, of 'knowing with'; the knowledge of familiarity.

This exchange arose when I suggested to Wayfarer that scientific knowledge is not irrelevant to self knowledge:

Socrates, at the Temple of Delphi.

Inside, he says, 'hey, I notice your neat slogan, gnōthi seauton, "know thyself". I like it, but there's a problem'.

'Oh yes? What?' says the Goddess.

'We don't have the technology yet. It's going to have to wait.' — Wayfarer

There's "know thyself" and then there's "know thyself better". — Janus

So I don't think there is any self-knowledge that is completely independent of culture, but I agree with what Gendlin seems to be saying that culture does not limit self-knowledge in the ways that it is often thought to.

So it also doesn't follow that culture does not contribute to self-knowledge. What I'm trying to say is it's not either/or; either just my ideas or someone else's.

No, there's "know thyself" and then there's "know thyself according to someone else's idea of who you are". — baker

Is there anything you know about yourself that is not couched in cultural terms? Or represented in a public language? Are these not ultimately "someone else's ideas"?

Beyond that, sure, we can know, in the sense of simply feel, our own inner feelings. Are they ineffable, though? If not, then how much of what we say we know in expressing these feelings comes from the actual experience and how much from the medium in which that experience is conveyed? If the expression or description of those feelings to others is possible, then would you not suspect that those feelings may be always already interpreted in culturally acquired terms?

If there are ineffable feelings, then by definition we can say nothing about them, and they are not knowledge, or at least not knowledge that can be shared. Eugene Gendlin has some interesting ideas about this; I know @Joshs is well into Gendlin, so he might have something to say on this problem of private knowledge.

Exactly! It is inferred, or imagined if you prefer, that the experience is given by, or is a union with, God, for example. On the other hand there may be a naturalistic explanation, since certain drugs bring about those kinds of experiences too. Of course the naturalistic explanation is an inference too and could also be wrong.

When it is said that the experience is mystical, and that it is a union or it is called "theosis" which brings in the further idea of union with God, then inferences are involved, no?

There’s is mystical union, theosis, which is said to be non inferential. — Wayfarer

The inference is not involved in the experience, which, sans inference is just affect, but in what we call the experience, and what we take its significance to be..

Yaldabaoth the Demiurge, — darthbarracuda

The flawed creator deity of the Gnostics is so much more lovable than Yahweh; since we can insult him with impunity.

BUT, 'an illusion' can only be had by a subject. — Wayfarer

More apposite, I think, would be to say that a subject can only be had by an illusion.

.doesn’t say much more than evolution is a natural occurrence. — Mww

Is there anything much more that can be said? Talking about parallel universes has come about due to us technologically augmenting what we can see along with the evolution of mathematics. But there is an element of what I refer to below in my response to Tom Storm as well: Wittgenstein's " Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language". Note that the "by means of language" is ambiguous; it could be the battle is by means of language as well as the bewitchment. Reminds me of a line from a poem by Jim Morrison (although he was talking about impotence):
" Words got me the wound and will get me well
If you believe it ". from 'The Death of my Cock'

Yes, but I wonder whether the subject itself is much more than a trick. :razz: But this does seem unlikely. — Tom Storm

An artefact of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness? We think in terms of the dyad subject/ object, or the grasper and the graspable. "Bewitchment by means of language"? The Buddhists point to the illusion of self as being due to our being mired in dualistic thought. The illusion seems to be that there is a higher kind of thought that can tell us determinate truths about the nature of reality, beyond just saying that it is not what dualistic thought tricks us into thinking it is.

:rofl: Absolutely sum-ptuous! :yum:

Battle against? — Manuel

'Struggle against' if that's more to your liking.

Perhaps we graze the surface of these things, or the structural properties of phenomena. — Manuel

Interesting question: are the structural properties of things intrinsic or extrinsic? To me 'intrinsic' implies 'changeless'.

It's also mental masturbation, which I don't object to, nor do I think you do either. — Manuel

Right, all forms of masturbation have their place, and are not to be scoffed at.

I can understand it being everything to some, meaningless verbal quibbles to others. But I don't know about the wise. — Manuel

Nothing fancy, I was just suggesting that something like a middle path is more balanced.

Though I'm unclear at what you're getting at. — Manuel

Just throwing up some random ideas in the vomitorium.

But Russell, who knew physics and mathematics very well, stated that physics tells us about the structural properties of the world, leaving the intrinsic nature of atoms (and quarks, fields, etc.) unknown. — Manuel

Philosophy is the battle against "intrinsic natures", that are the hypostatized progeny of the scientific and commonsense inquiry into extrinsic natures. Philosophy, is, in other words both descriptive and corrective.

Apart from that it's thinking how best to live, and examining one's life to see just where the failures lie.

Apart from that it's just finkin; for finkin's sake, otherwise known as conceptual art, or mental masturbation.

Everything to some people, nothing to others and somewhere in between to the wise.

I could go on: but should I ?

My view is that, certainly, h. sapiens evolved, pretty much as discovered (although the details keep shifting) but that once the ability to abstract and reason developed, then humans escape from biological determinism. In other words, we can discover things that are not dictated by evolutionary development as such, we 'transcend the biological'. Tremendously unpopular and politically-incorrect view, of course. — Wayfarer

I agree with this. When the ability to abstract was realized through symbolic language we were no longer constrained to follow the ageless patterns of instinct, and the rest is history. Morphological mutations which enabled us to form diverse vowel sounds and grasp objects (opposable thumb) coupled with the common animal ability to recognize pattern (without which no biologically complex organism would be able to perceived their environments) enabled the genesis of language.

I wouldn't say we can totally "transcend the biological" though; but we can certainly break the chains of genetically enforced patterns of behavior. Culture, more and more elaborated, then allows us to do things simply for their own sake, just for the love of them; so we have the arts, literature, music and religion. I would say science too, as that involves free exercise of the creative imagination as much as the arts, but it also has practical significance, as it enables development of new technologies which (could anyway if they were managed wisely) have survival value.

it isn’t recognition of patterns we want to know about, it being common across species; it’s word development, which is not common at all. — Mww

You may find this article interesting: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/human-ancestors-may-have-evolved-physical-ability-speak-more-25-million-years-ago-180973759/

Man, get ready to dodge the tomatoes.....bringing Kant into a discussion analyzing strictly Platonic shadows. Much of Plato is found in Kant, to be sure, but not this. — Mww

I'm not talking about Plato though ( OK, I may have gone off topic, but the topic of this thread is shadowy in any case); I'm talking specifically about how recognition of objects, and of the ways that objects can be arranged, leads to an apprehension of basic arithmetic.

We are not born with the ability to count and calculate, even though we are obviously born with the capacity to develop these abilities in our interaction with the perceived diversifies and similarities of the environments we inhabit.

These abilities, I think it most plausible to believe, are developed in our concrete embodied interactions with the world; they could not be developed in abstraction. Abstractions come afterwards, I am claiming, and only when symbolic language is developed. Recognition, and pattern recognition, come before abstraction and it seems they would be the basis for the development of language. This must be so, since it is obvious that even animals can do it.

When a word for tree was developed and applied to many kinds of trees, the recognition of the patterns of configuration that trees manifest must already have been in place. But no abstract universal or notion of an abstract universal needs to be there for that. That comes later with the elaborate abstract analysis made possible by symbolic language. That's my take on it anyhow.

A weird image! He looks pretty relaxed, though.

neither of which are reliant on the least on neuroscience, unless you've got a neurological disorder. — Wayfarer

If we can know ourselves without neuroscience, it may be possible to know ourselves even better with the aid of neuroscience. Don't forget that Varela et al advocated neuroscience as an adjunct to phenomenology: neurophenomenology.

Also, you don't understand disorders without understanding orders.

Doesn't the synthetic a priori, according to Kant, require prior actual experience to be able to then realize what is necessarily involved in all possible experience?

I imagine that arithmetic started with what are perceptually obvious attributes of groups of different numbers of objects; that is I don't imagine it all started purely abstractly "in the head". Of course I may be wrong, but that seems most plausible to me.

I'm not even sure we're disagreeing, that's how much "in the dark" I am. :halo:

There's "know thyself" and then there's "know thyself better".

I don't get that. It's not necessary to map everything against the brain, as if that amounts to an explanation. The neurosciences are vital sciences but I can't see the need to do that. — Wayfarer

If it can be done it will be done. If it can be done, then why not do it?

They do, some more than others. That's what I'm saying. We can't but believe in some external reality which our representations reflect, we also would be naïve in the extreme to not even believe we can be mistaken. So the question is already trivially answered.

Thus the only question of import is, given any particular belief, to what extent is is caused by an external reality and to what extent by internal assumptions. That it is, in some proportion, caused by both, is something we can't help but agree to, so it drops out of the conversation (or should). The actual proportions, in each case, are what matter. — Isaac

I agree with this. I'm not sure we could work out "proportions" very definitely, but in principle I think it's a good way of looking at it. But it would seem to be incompatible with any form of anti-realism.

I don’t understand how merely arranging six objects in various ways shows the attributes that defines the quantity “six”. Arranged as a four-sided figure, arranged as a pyramid, arranged with each other as a succession of points.....there’s still just a quantity of objects represented by some number. — Mww

I perhaps didn't explain it very well. What I meant was to take six objects and separate them into groups. So you separate them into groups of two and it becomes immediately obvious that you get three groups of two, with nothing left out. Or you can do two groups of three. So the qualities of divisibility of six objects is immediately perceptually apparent. Try it with seven objects and it becomes apparent that it can only be divided into seven "groups " of one. any other combination will leave a remainder.

Akashic fields, or morphic fields. It's a no-go topic here, but suffice to say it stymies standard-issue physicalism. — Wayfarer

Sure, it might be rejected by "standard issue" physicalists, but it's an alternative explanation to positing that consciousness survives the death of the body, and it is not incompatible with physicalism, per se.

I still think W's notion of family resemblances is more accurate to the facts of usage than the ancient idea of essences. But each to their own I guess.

I don't know if what is purported to be evidence that some children can 'remember' details of lives that they could not possibly have gleaned from anywhere is really good evidence of that.

And even if it were it might be a case of the children somehow contacting some kind of encoded memory of past events. We might be living in a simulation and it might be a software glitch for example.

Or the physical universe might somehow encode information about everything that has ever happened which a human brain can sometimes inexplicitly access ( if everything is at the quantum level "entangled" for example).

I have no doubt reality is stranger than we imagine perhaps stranger than we can imagine. And in any case those children have functioning brains don't they?

We are not compelled to default to explanations imagined by the ancients who did not have the benefit of all the scientific knowledge acquired since their time.

You've lost me. I have no idea what it could mean for words to "have essences".

"Water" doesn't have one essential meaning , but various associated meanings according to what people use the word for.

Consider these:

" I had water on the knee" referring to some fluid not H2O

" I need to get the dirty water off my chest" referring to ? Mucous? A bad feeling?

Of course these usages are related to the usage of 'water' to refer to H2O. That's why Wittgenstein uses the notion of family resemblances.

We don't know of any examples of consciousness that are not the functions of brains.

Such may be common practice, yes, and may be true under the auspices of certain cognitive theories. It’s all a matter of answering the age-old question......where to begin with metaphysical inquiries: do we begin with that which is given to us, or do we begin with that which is in us, that it is given to. — Mww

I tend to think that what is in us is given to us as much as what is external. I see it all as part of a relational reality in which the notions of external and internal are not absolute, but are relative to what we consider to be the boundaries of our organisms.

So saying, there is nothing contained in the mere perception of six objects, that some relation exists between them. There must be a relation between the objects and us, but when we perform operations on numbers, it is the relation between them alone that makes possible the operations we perform. — Mww

If I understand what you say here, then my comment is that I was thinking of six similar objects, or six identical kinds of objects; for example six oranges. In any case it doesn't matter to my arguments, you could imagine six objects of any kind that are small enough to move around. My point was that we can arrange them in all the ways necessary such as to show the attributes that go to define the quantity six.

There is nothing whatsoever given from, e.g., 29, alone, that says it is a prime number. That is it a prime, can only arise from some relation it must have. That it must have that relation comes from us, and what that relation is, can THEN be perceptually shown. — Mww

So, in reference to what I wrote above, if we have 29 objects we can try all the ways of arranging them to see if they can be divided into any number of equal groups, and find that we cannot. We don't need any numerals to so this, all we need is the pattern recognition ability to distinguish between single objects and groups.

An exact genetic clone is in principle possible so this isn’t sufficient. — Michael

That a copy of you can be (in principle) created using your unique genetic signature does nothing to deny the way that unique signature identifies you as the organism that bears a history from birth to death. A copy of you is not you, because it was not born when you were, or in the way you were,and had not lived the life you had lived up to the time it was created by copying your DNA.

That this physical process maintains token identity isn’t a mind-independent fact. It’s not unreasonable to say that given sufficient physical changes the object is no longer the same, e.g with the ship of Theseus or the grandfather’s axe it can be warranted to assert that the ship and axe at the end of the story are a different ship and axe from the start of the story. Neither conclusion is wrong. — Michael

After I have made the distinction between a self-regulating organism which, if parts are replaced, replaces them itself, and an artificial construction (where if all parts are replaced it is arguable as to whether the construction should be thought to have retained its identity) I don't know why you would return to the artificial examples as if you thought they have any bearing on my argument.

Which you can only say in hindsight, after catching your wife cheating on you. And it is only in hidsight that you will see certain past events etc. as evidence of the cheating, while at the time, you didn't.

To put crudely, a realist would need to maintain that his wife coming home late on a Wednesday is proof that she's having an affair. (For practical reasons, this is generally not feasible.) — baker

I'm not following your objection. It doesn't matter what I only see in hindsight, that is it doesn't matter that I didn't know at the time whether it was true or false that my wife had been having an affair: it was nonetheless either true or false at the time despite my ignorance.Why should the truth depend on my knowing it?

The point I'm generally making here (and this goes for Hanover as well) is that no-one assumes all of their models are exact representations of an external reality, and no-one assumes none of them are. The choice over which we behave as if were true and which we approach with uncertainty is a psychological issue, not a philosophical one. — Isaac

I think the philosophical question is not as to which of our "models" (beliefs, ideas) are "exact representations of an external reality" (whatever that could even mean), but as to whether our beliefs and ideas can more or less reflect an external reality.

As for meaning is use, I haven't really grasped what it is Wittgenstein wanted to convey. — TheMadFool

A fairly simple idea: how people use words shows their meanings.

My token identity is maintained, despite the flux of my physical body, by the way I think and talk about myself (and the way others think and talk about me). I'm the same person that was alive 20 years ago because that's how I think and talk about myself. That's anti-realism. — Michael

The realist explanation is that you are a unique changing organism with a history that extends from your birth to your death. You also have a unique genetic signature (DNA).

I think it follows that if God is not anything then God is nothing, to put it slightly differently if God is not any thing then God is no thing. Of course that just means God is not a thing, so then the thing is, what is a thing? But then maybe God is a thing; maybe God is a feeling. If you have a feeling, is that, or is that not, a thing? You know the colloquialism as expressed in examples like "Wearing red, is that a thing?". Meaning is given by use, right?

There really is no problem with the apophatic technique if you will allow me to call it such. Nagarjuna's tetralemma comes to mind. — TheMadFool

There can be nothing wrong with it because there is nothing to it. QED

Then the question becomes "Is God" and the answer is "No" or "God is...not". Or if you are a fan of dialetheism, the answers to the question would be "Neither yes nor no" and/or "both yes and no", and then " Both "Neither yes nor no" and "Both yes and no" and neither ""Neither yes nor no" nor "Both yes and no"". And then...see where this is going? Where does this leave us...and God?

Is Apo phat or phin or in crisis?

I have to keep this short, in that this is a thread concerned with Greek philosophy, of which I am rather less than proficient. When I say we are affected by immaterial objects, I mean to indicate, on the one hand rationally by feelings, and on the other epistemically by the categories. Of the former we are immediately conscious, of the latter we are not. The former is given, the latter must be synthetically derived. — Mww

It's interesting that you say we are affected rationally by feelings. Generally being affected by feelings is considered as being irrationally affected. In my experience feelings are manifested bodily. I'm going to have to think some more on that.

I think I get what you mean by saying that we are affected epistemically by the categories; without categories we could not know anything. I understand categories as being abstracted from perceived differences of material and form, so I think of them rather as material than immaterial.

You hinted at it when you said “we are discussing number”, but then you went on to give an example with A number. Exhibition of an empirical example cannot ground the validity of immaterial objects, re: it doesn’t mean anything to discuss number by invoking five, because any congruent representation would be sufficient, and any example of anything is always reducible to that which it is an example of. — Mww

Are you saying that one example of say five objects cannot ground our understanding of number? If so, I would say that I wasn't suggesting that it could, but on the other hand any example of a number of objects exemplifies the same properties as any other example of that number of objects. I mean we can literally divide, for example any six objects (that are small enough to move around that is) into six separate units, two groups of three or three groups of two. Or we can have one alone and the other five separate, or a group of two and a group of four. So all the abstract attributes of the number six can be perceptually shown.

When it comes to numbers that are too large to allow us to play around with that number of objects, then we would have to designate single objects to stand for multiples, and so on. It pays to remember that calculation used to be done on an abacus, which is a very material way of showing arithmetical operations.

Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding you and addressing something you weren't talking about.

Well, if you fail to see the connection it isn't my fault is it? — TheMadFool

If you fail to explain the connection you think you see. or address the difference I noted, in a convincing way, it isn't my fault is it?

Edit: I apologize, I misread you. I thought you were saying something else: and I think see what you were getting at now. :up: