Not physics, but the physicists. They're as big know-at-alls as we are here at TPF. I don't even see any physicists with a glimmer of understanding of the philosophy of their own field.

You've yet to explain Putin's vast wealth. Please proceed to do so. — Hippyhead

Take away eleven zeros and he is just an ordinary man: 1. He will be first ever to take it all with him. 2. His family are big spenders. 3. He plans to give it all back

morality only arises in a community of conscious beings, and can only be as "absolute" as their shared reality. — Echarmion

I suppose shared reality would need to come from common human inheritance and traits or from close to uniform environmental possibilities and limitations everywhere. Should men and women have identical ethics or should differences be recognized and accounted for? Should we gradually phase in ethical norms by age?

The classical problem is an intolerant insistence on universal ethics to offer a cure against evidence that most people are not generally moral even by their own standards. Few of us are saints. Cultural differences are fading with globalization of social standards but they are still out there. Some countries are more caring than others.

solve the problem by killing anybody that disagrees with you — Restitutor

Totalitarian governments are doing that already. What if there was only one nation in the future, would it be permissive of moral plurality?

in Ancient Greece women were not used for sexual pleasure, only procreation. Therefore the only way to enlightenment must be illegal relations with younger citizens. — Outlander

Ancient Greeks were crude and unjust as measured by either their traditional religious ethics or by our modern standards. But it isn't fair to judge them in retrospect. American Vietnam veterans have been both heroes and monsters in different places in changing times. Anyway, ethics is not about what people actually are but what norms of belief and behavior they should hold up as ideals.

a) morality usually deals with social obligations, and while there are many examples of a connection to divine law or will, moral duties are rarely exactly fixed.
b) certain moral duties are consistent across different societies and times. — Echarmion

We and our society have privileged morality, there is but one true morality and it is ours. Unfortunately, others who disagree in the details also claim to be privileged.

The only way to resolve this conflicts is to appeal to one absolute authority to grant us all absolute morality. If we can agree on one unique absolute authority. An absolute authority would need to have absolute foundations. Can logic, philosophy, science, or faith be that foundation? In ancient Greek enlightenment many thought that there is only one absolute and it's ideal logic, therefore the one God must be the god of logic.

asking if we're projecting our nature onto Nature if we see morality in birds. — frank

I suppose so. Then we have to ask if the different patterns of behavior serve any purpose at all. Do they help the birds to survive, were these selected or are these a neglected folly of nature? Evolutionary dogma might overstate the case for evolution but here it could still be something else.

"Functional : of or having a special activity, purpose, or task; relating to the way in which something works or operates." — Gnomon

Functionality is contextual only to what we can see and perhaps that could open things up for purpose in things we can't see.

I really, honest-to-ever-loving-God, in all sincerity, mean it when I say - anyone who is not as critical of Biden as they were of Trump may as well be a Trump supporter. — StreetlightX

... systemic conservative bias in the US and the huge disadvantage to the left that presents, ... [?] what the left can do tactically in hostile political circumstances to both gain some foothold in terms of policy and stave off another Trumpist-style administration. [/?] — Baden

Time for a smarter approach. — Baden

Leftists start from the top of the ladder and climb down a couple of rungs, rightists start from the mud and climb up maybe a quarter of the way. Pragmatists have a smarter approach, they start in the middle with some facts then climb a bit both up and down. They can then make the claim and actually the appearance of pleasing both sides. Is Russia communist or fascist? I can't decide.

purpose cant be explained in terms of matter and energy? — frank

That's part of the argument under discussion. Most people are economic materialists, they are motivated by more goods, money, and power. Science offers no answer for matter and energy, so far. Maybe Deacon will show us how.

For liberal theism, this could be rephrased as how much purpose can be explained by mechanistic models? Morality cannot be so easily explained, any moral purpose if not inherent is intentional. I've always been amazed by wild birds' inherent ethics. Some species will strongly aid others of their kind at the risk of life. Others only protect their own young.

End-directed forms of causality, or purpose, is clearly an aspect of life and consciousness — frank

Yes, but not magically all at once, as is usually implied by teleology. Nature is infinitely complex with many levels of complexity and we are rarely smart enough to look past just one level at a time. This is a valid reason to be suspicious of broad claims, even if eventually they turn out to be correct. For instance, impressed but not convinced, both Hume and Kant proposed their own alternatives to Newton's Laws.

Hemoglobin's ability to transport oxygen in the blood stream [p.9] can be understood either for the single blood cell or for oxygen transport functionality one level above. The cell is a structure that houses a hemoglobin molecule to fit oxygen like a glove and just the right amount of energy will cause the release of the oxygen at any peripheral organ. It serves until it dies. The functionality is to have enough working blood cells in total for all organs to survive.

The Zeno example of infinite divisibility may not have a philosophical solution. It was solved after 150 years of intense search by the greatest minds for mathematics as the Fundamental Theory of Calculus. For physics, quantization as Planck length-time guarantees a minimum step where division must end. To my thinking, unbounded lines and numbers are geometric and mathematical, infinites are unmanageably philosophical.

"absential" is supposed to pick out the object of purposeful behavior — frank

I'm still confused by absential. I understand what a key missing from a lock is, or that my pocket is empty, but that seems too specific for what needs to come later in the book. Absence should incorporate enough of the unknown background environment to explain symbiosis and forward evolution.

I love this, thousands protest the 'steal' in DC and Trump passes them by on his way to go golfing. — praxis

The golf course by the factory lay
So the boys could see the men at play

How is it that you can’t see what’s happening? — Brett

Is this what you mean?

The "Elephant in the Room" is the population explosion which is an exponential increase. Humanity is hurtling toward a population level that will not be a sustainable. The first thing to go will be the Welfare State, Economies, Rule of Law and Civilisation will collapse under the load, and technology will be too late. — Drazjan

a : conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist
— called also weak anthropic principle
b : the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life
— called also strong anthropic principle” — Michael McMahon

Or perhaps
a: conditions of the universe must allow at least one universe
b: Given this universe, such as it is, it is inevitable that bacteria exist

An epistemic argument can be formulated that only the Earth hosts intelligent life. If there ever was any other intelligent life we will never know due to the limitations on transmission of information from the cosmological past even with whatever technology we might develop in the future short life span of humanity.

In other words, bacterial life is just about certain, but if we can't discover extraterrestrial intelligence soon we never will.

that which is too novel or too demanding to be handled by automatic routine becomes escalated for a full brain attentional response — apokrisis

Is this the reaction to a bucket of icy cold water or a charging tiger which are animal responses held in common with a paramecium or an earthworm, or is it deliberated act of educated judgment, creativity, adaptation?

attentional spotlight is what emerges from the active suppression of every other possible state of interpretative response. We are conscious of "something" because the brain has just filtered out "everything else" that might have been the case — apokrisis

Does this mean that experience is not intentionally directed but emerges as an act of subconscious attentional focus?

It seems to me that even behavior patterns of matter and their statistical tendencies for this or that, are still not quite getting at the question. It does provide interesting ideas for how biology can be considered information rather than mechanistic, but that's not answering the question I am interested in. — schopenhauer1

That seems to summarize the dilemma of the social sciences. When they study minute mechanistic processes they get funded and succeed with many small publishable results. When they study meaningful, experientially relevant topics the results are washed out by the inherent multi-faceted complexity of the subject matter and consequently lose funding.

Pink Floyd and the Beatles became successful after years of touring. If they posted the same music today, without touring they would receive very few listens. — TheQuestioner

You would say that the difference between a musician and a successful musical is some timely marketable shtick, a successful presentation plus audience appreciation, which together are measurable in moneys earned?

Zero is just a strange number with many guises. It isn't just 0 or Nothing but also the dimensionless Origin of any arbitrary observer in space-time or of the absolute here-now of the Self. In this sense its opposite would be untamed metaphysical infinity.

The library heroically fetched a copy of the book for me. It was sad to see four bored workers and no patrons. I am grateful to you for bringing this topic for attention. It seems as if I've been in a slumber on emergence for a decade.

I am curious how Deacon develops 'absential' as the centerpiece of his theory. When thinking of holes in wholes, Emmentaler Swiss cheese or a mathematical doughnut comes to mind. These are fixed though, there can't be much action there. The example of the red blood cell is intriguing from evolutionary, structural physical chemistry, and functional perspectives. Just the right hole for an oxygen atom for transport is shaped and preserved, and the atom is loosely held by the cell's molecular structure so it can later be released. But absences in other instances could also be environmental or symbiotic in some sense.

criticism of computational theory of mind — schopenhauer1

I read that Deacon objects to the overly simple linear computer modeling for either the massive neuronal cross-wiring of the brain or for the unknown complex higher functionality of the mind. In the example of Big Blue's defeat of chess champion Kasparov, Deacon says that the computer was loaded with the all relevant historical games and the computer's speedy and deep calculations just wore the human into exhaustion. In other words, it was more a competition of computational speed and not of mental power.

To me, the real test would be one of judgment, creativity, and adaptability.

Yes, but that provides the excuse to stop the lawlessness with order

Expect this next few months to be scorched earth destruction on the part of Trump. Yall ain't done at all. — StreetlightX

:alarmed: He is replacing a number of Defense Dept officials. Just to be paranoid, which is called for with HeWhoMustNotBeNamed, is this just childish revenge or part of a preparation to mobilize federal agents as was done against the Portland protests?

While the personnel changes added to the tumult in the wake of Esper's departure, it's not clear how much impact they could have on the massive Pentagon bureaucracy. The department is anchored by the tenet of civilian control of the military — NBC News

I'm not going to push this further, but Plato's final reaction to this discussion would have been that there is no subject-object relationship either up or down between (metaphysical) levels of being. Rather, all being is interactive or it cannot be.

difference between epistemological solipsism and metaphysical solipsism — Partinobodycular

Thank you, I have only considered metaphysical solipsism which is an entirely different rabbit's hole. Descartes pulled a rabbit out and asked what that looks like to standard philosophy of his day and came up with dualism and Early Modern enlightenment. To today's standard epistemology the mind is still an unresolved puzzle because it does not exist in a philosophical sense.

According to this take, what is knowable needs to be publicly justifiable true belief, and solipsism denies all of these conditions as meaningless. The notion of classical epistemological knowledge is under attack and not solipsism. Solipsism gains its strength from its soundness as well as from being impervious to dogmatic refutation. To say that it is not 'logical' is a fallacy of circularity, it is the critic who presupposes classical language and logic universally for every rabbit hole then concludes that anything that denies this presupposition is necessarily false.

Solipsists love other viewpoints — Partinobodycular

?
I presented the most positive and strongest possible position that I could imagine for a solipsist to hold and to defend against any critique.
But if you are a convinced solipsist then how can you also allow for incompatible philosophies?

One finger cannot point at itself. — creativesoul

For solipsism there is only one. Memory, reflection, imagination, creativity are all purely solipsist activities. What's wrong with solipsism is the dogmatism attached, there is no reason to accept that there are no other philosophical worlds. For one, subjectivism is similar but broader in that it encompasses solipsism as a special case.

Probably beyond metaphysics — jgill

I have no clue what metaphysics is. It is not defined unambiguously. — god must be atheist

Much of the confusion arises from frequent time honored conflation of realist ontology with metaphysics. Ontology is perfectly adequate to the study of what there is or what there could be given realist philosophical axioms. Metaphysics is the appropriate term for examining all philosophical axiomatic systems as systems rather than what can be derived or speculated in each philosophy.

Metaphysics is analogous to pure mathematics in that both are purely abstract and have abstract applications as well. Meta-metaphysics is to metaphysics (in plural) as meta-mathematics is to mathematics (also plural).

"In solipsism, only the mind exists [there is only mind] ... the totality of all that you [feel, think, imagine,] and perceive, this includes all of the senses. What are the people around me other than images, sounds, and feelings?" — Darkneos

The solipsist is living a daydream in the present where there are no objects to 'exist', or events or facts to stand in their place. All feelings and sensations are self-evident and all logic is fuzzy and intuitive. There is no formal language, only a mix of words and emerging thoughts from a deeper source. There is no assumption needed about the past or the cultural and social history of the solipsist living only in the present. Time flows both ways only in the short-term past and future. Epistemology and ethics are self-serving without regard to what might at times be imagined is outside this cocoon. The solipsist is or is-not as the totality of the universe.

Counter-arguments invariably introduce their own un-solipsistic absurd strawmen to be knocked down by their proprietary elementary logic. Realist objects, universals, formalism, or logic are in no way applicable to solipsism.

People seem awfully quick in predicting Trump's downfall in disgrace. — Echarmion

:smile: :up:
As of this moment Biden has edged ahead in both Pennsylvania and Georgia, and Biden is heading for around 300 electoral votes for better than a 60 vote win. The Trump court cases are without merit but will be dragged out until Federal charges are filed against Trump and his family. If he wants to stay out of jail and ever see a penny of his future ill-begotten billions he will make a deal before January 20.

Ultimately, yes.

Not someone but something. Observations can be repeated or measured for public scrutiny or it is not science.

So some facts are agreed by many. But if there was no private experience of facts, no public fact would exist. — Olivier5

You're making a good point. I'm missing at least a third kind of knowledge. If I am hungry is subjective and private to me, then we are hungry is still not a scientific fact but is dependent on each of many people asked. This is an example of facts dependent on individuals, one of many kinds of relativism. Other examples are all around, it is raining, it is hot, my pocket is empty, the sky is red and purple.

Scientific laws and facts are often thought as being universal, as being everywhere and nowhere. That's just a conceptual oversight of something Newton understood which is that there is always an implied and unavoidable origin in space and time to every law and observation. That origin is not absolutely fixed within the absolute 'I' (God is the only other absolute) but is 'arbitrary' in the sense that any imaginary daemon may place it anywhere in the universe and the laws will still be correctly applicable (not 'true'). For this to so the universe must be uniform at sufficiently (whatever that means) large scales, and this is axiomatically assumed. Newton didn't know about black holes.

metaphysical causality — Gnomon

or just metaphysical relation or metaphysical transcendence is a very significant part of trying to understand much of philosophy. What is understanding? How does communication carry any meaning? How can we possibly understand someone else's or even an animal's feelings?

Sorry for the delay, I am still waiting for the library to retrieve and transfer this book for me. After looking at the snippets available online, one thing became clear which is that this subject is mostly unfamiliar to me.

Since Deacon is creating abstract philosophy he makes up and redefines many terms to cover the topic. An interesting introduction is to read the book starting with the glossary.

2 is just 1 multiplied by 2. — Olivier5

1 is not only subjective and private but (in that special sense only) also possibly absolute, unquestionable, and irrefutable. 2 Public knowledge, like all scientific facts, changes or evolves over time. 1 I am hungry is an absolute fact because I say so. 2 Rome is the greatest Western empire. This is an expired fact.

If we're talking emergence, then is that private, scientific, or both? Scientific emergence is already a puzzle but at least it has some history.

"epistemic" implies a viewer. More generally, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. — Olivier5

There are two choices here 1) I know that x, 2) We know that x. Belief and justification are quite different for the two, so they're not the same. In the first person, belief is subjective and private, justification can be deduction or personal experiential or a reference to a public or conventional fact. We know that or it is known that is a publicly conventional belief justified by expert evidence.

The number of dots on the face of a die has two answers, It's either the side facing me or what is publicly known of all six sides. Neither of these is from nowhere.

How do y'all think Bernie would have done? Would it have been this close? — bert1

I always assumed that Bernie was a Russian plant in the classic communist tradition.We have seen way too many like him for the last hundred years. We get lots of loose talk of 'class' struggles reminiscent of nineteenth century England or Germany, but no admitted specific plans for what to do after the despised capitalists and their bourgeois lackeys are eliminated. Nevertheless, as per either communist or fascist strategy, Bernie fragments and polarizes liberal political opinion and mobilizes his small but growing extreme.

In 2016, Bernie (with a big assist from Comey) just about guaranteed a Trump victory by disenchanting would be democratic voters.

all that exists is I or a content of my mind — Tristan L

Language from other incompatible theories imports implicit assumptions which could make this solipsism self-contradictory. For example, 'exists' is explicitly Parmenidean for the one or Aristotelian for the many. In common parlance this need not be recognized, but philosophically it can become crucial. That's why only the vague 'is' is acceptable. This goes for Descartes as well, where only 'I am' is correct.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a Trump ally who usually avoids criticizing the president in public, told reporters Wednesday that "claiming you've won the election is different from finishing the counting."

The big rat is preparing to jump ship. :smile:

A possible scenario could be tRump loses, sues in swing states, drags suits out till January, then leaves quietly in exchange for not getting prosecuted for high treason and other federal crimes.

Just in case, I want to be the first to celebrate.
:party: ♫♫

Once there was a wicked witch in the lovely land of Oz
And a wickeder, wickeder, wickeder witch there never, never was
He filled the folks in Munchkin land with terror and with dread
'Till one fine day from Kansas way a cyclone caught a house
That brought the wicked, wicked witch his doom
As he was flying on his broom
For the house fell on his head and the coroner pronounced him dead
And thru the town the joyous news was spread
Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The wicked witch
Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead

Like with natural selection, every critter is reaching for something, food or sex or security. The engine of life is this ever present absence. — frank

But natural selection is based on natural profligacy of species, environmental chaos, and shear dumb luck of being in the right place just at the right time. Natural selection is not directional nor emergent.

There are plenty of counter-examples though which remain baffling mysteries, like the early development/emergence of feathers and light air-filled bone structure for dinosaurian birds which are necessary for a much later emergence of flight.