If you haven't read him yet, you might find interesting the writings of the naturalist philosopher of mind Owen Flanagan who has studied and appreciates Buddhist meditative practices. — 180 Proof

Yes, The Problem of the Soul is good.

{See https://inquiringmind.com/article/3102_20_bodhi-facing-the-great-divide/ for a ‘modern traditionalist analysis) — Wayfarer

It looks to me like the article got the following part right:

The weaknesses of Classical Buddhism are typical of other forms of traditional religion. These include a tendency toward complacency, a suspicion of modernity, the identification of cultural forms with essence, and a disposition to doctrinal rigidity. At the popular level, Classical Buddhism often shelves the attitude of critical inquiry that the Buddha himself encouraged in favor of devotional fervor and unquestioning adherence to hallowed doctrinal formulas.

And I think it does bring up some decent questions. First, why wasn't this solution hit on earlier? It is very effective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd think a lot of the right factors had to come together. Off the top of my head:

1. Warm blooded for faster and more stable brain performance.
2. A highly social species that could greatly capitalize on language and culture.
3. Bipedal locomotion that freed up forelimbs for carrying things.
4. Hands suitable for tool use.

Those four factors alone would weed out a large majority of all animal species that have ever lived on Earth.

I can't see any mileage in arguing about what the words mean. The best one could do in a situation like the one we are in is to make an agreement about how to use the words and then deal with any substantial issues. — Ludwig V

:up:

Something that seemingly can't be reinforced too much.

Yeah, I would say*, you and the computer you were typing on yesterday have extension along the temporal dimension of spacetime.

* Well, in a philosophy conversation anyway. :wink:

They are in a 'present' related to their reference frame, but that is a subjective notion of "present" that breaks down when trying to understand the bigger picture.

And no, I haven't been considering time travel, other than the time travel we are all doing continuously, as far as I can tell.

There is a lot to this....

In the physical world we should use presentism

The physical world is the basis for our mental worlds.

In our mental worlds we should use eternalism.

Philosophy isn't always clear or you have to look closely to see what applies and context. — Mark Nyquist

Being a physicalist monist, the idea of a mental world independent of the physical world doesn't resonate for me.

I recognize that we are apt to have deeply engrained presentist intuitions, and for practical purposes we more often than not make use of a presentist perspective. However there are practical cases where the STR needs to be taken into account, such as GPS technology.

I guess I don't know how to make sense of your statement here.

The only claim I am making is that presentism isn't compatible with STR. Yes, there is a lot of context to consider.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presentism/#RelaPhys

Counterargument is bold in the extreme. It seems to require that we simply overturn the best physics on the basis of metaphysical arguments. Perhaps we could take this line (but it seems a very challenging route. The arguments for presentism (those stated in §2, for instance) look somewhat underpowered when it comes to delivering that result. The way in which counterarguers have typically tried to proceed, then, is by giving independent motivations for rejecting the special theory of relativity (both Crisp 2008 and Monton 2006 may be read as doing this). An interesting way to pursue this project is to argue that STR is to be rejected on scientific grounds, rather than for some purely philosophical reason, suggesting that another scientific theory (Quantum Mechanics, perhaps) requires absolute simultaneity. This is the approach taken by Tooley (1997: 335–71), though in defence of the growing block theory rather than presentism. Nonetheless, the orthodoxy remains strongly opposed to this kind of approach.

Presentism works. — Mark Nyquist

If you deny relativity.

It is as if we were saying our emotions analyzed our emotions, no? — NotAristotle

I'd put it as... Our cognitive faculties can recognize and logically consider our emotional reactions. No, I wouldn't say our emotions can analyze our emotions, but I don't know what it would mean for emotions to analyze something.

The predictive system can study itself? — NotAristotle

Why not?

You don't want to answer them, OK. But that weakens your case. — RogueAI

One would hope, only in the minds of those as subject to fallacious thinking as you are. But what ya gonna do? :chin:

E pur si muove.

So it's impossible for certain conglomerations of plumbing to be conscious? Which systems of valves, pipes, pumps, etc. are possibly conscious and which aren't and how do you know? — RogueAI

Why would I want to waste any more time, trying to explain the physical working of things, to someone who denies there is any physical working of things?

No one has suggested the possibility of NY sewers being conscious, so that is just a strawman.

I'm well aware of your ignorant incredulity towards physicalism. No need to tell me where we differ.

I wouldn't say they are fascist. But they may (unconsciously) hold views that conform with fascist tendencies — schopenhauer1

Many Christian literalists hold monarchy as an ideal, as that is what they expect in an afterlife. The extent to which such a view is consciously held varies, but it tends to be there to some degree as a consequence of the culture.

I think what schopenhaur1 implies, rather than that Trump himself is fascist, is that many Trump supporters are fascist, and they see his actions as an opening of the door, inviting them in. In reality he's just using them for his own personal gain, what schop describes as narcissistic. And, it appears like the number of fascists is sufficient to make opening the door to fascism worthwhile for him. — Metaphysician Undercover

:up:

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. It's believable, given its setting in time, but perhaps isn't indicative of how a fascist movement would operate now. — BC

Hmm... Joe Steele by Harry Turtledove, published in 2015, is a horrifyingly plausible alternative history along the same lines. Now I wonder if there was some plagiarism going on.

Still, it was a good book. While reading it, it was somewhat of a relief to know that Trump doesn't read.

By "naturalism" Plantinga seems to mean non-belief in God in this context. It appears that someone who does believe in God can, according to Plantinga's proposals, maintain that our cognitive abilities are reliable. Although it's possible I have misunderstood Plantinga. — NotAristotle

Plantinga does believe that we can believe that our cognitive faculties are reliable, because God created them to be so. However it would be a recipe for self-delusion to accept the circular argument that one is justified in believing in God, because otherwise one would have to accept that one's cognitive faculties are unreliable to some degree. The EAAN is a poor rationalization for believing in God, rather than a good argument against naturalism.

No, anti-theism is moral opposition to God on the basis that belief in God is harmful to people. It's not an ontological claim, but a moral one. — Hallucinogen

No. Anti-theism is opposition to theism.

Wouldn't there be the possibility to know one's emotions and thereby know why one is acting? And, is it not the case that if we know how we are going to act, we have the ability to act in a manner contrary to what we are conscious of?

And, if consciousness really is an illusion, why the illusion? Wouldn't we be better equipped evolutionarily speaking to see the truth; reality as it really is. — NotAristotle

Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, while failing to provide a persuasive argument against naturalism, can provide some insight into the fact that given evolution and naturalism we have good reason to question the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

Lucky for us, questioning the reliability of our cognitive faculties has the potential to greatly increase their reliability. Or as a Nobel Prize winning physicist put it, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

There are generally two big responses to save reduction. One is that we just lack the computational abilities to get to the reduction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The Three Body Problem (which BTW, is the title of a great SciFi book) at least suggests that the problem goes much deeper than availability of computational resources:

In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation.[1] The three-body problem is a special case of the n-body problem. Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required.

Why do I sit here and write this? What drives me to do it? Not what I think is driving me, but what is actually pulling my strings doing this? My emotions surrounding the act of writing all of this. Is my emotions driving me to find survival in a group here? Predicting that if I write something good it will generate connection to the tribe, to the group and put me in a better place for survival? Is it an act against death? Is it about survival? — Christoffer

:cool:

I think philosophy consists in questioning choice and the choices one makes in order to understand how and why one chooses. One tends to learn more from making unwise choices, IME, than from "making choices wisely" – in other words, failure, like loss, is the teacher, and those who do not seek to learn such lessons are foolish (i.e. unwise, or do not 'love wisdom'). — 180 Proof

:up:

To put that in my own words, I would say "reductionism" is ill-defined. Perhaps a properly defined reductionism may not be at odds with emergentism at all. — NotAristotle

I would think we would have to reach more definitive conclusion as to the quantum foundation of nature to have much hope of being free from fuzzy boundary issues between quantum views and classical views. In any case reductionism and weak emergentism work very well at scales where quantum effects can be treated as just noise.

Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it would be foolish to assume reductionism as a given until it is decisively disproved, since reductionism itself was never been decisively proved in the first place. Reductionism trades off millennia old intuitions and philosophical arguments, and this might be grounds for dismissing it as much as supporting it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You bring up a good point, but rather than swing between supporting or dismissing, why not simply recognize the need for a more complex and nuanced view?

@RogueAI

Somewhat creepily, the video below was suggested to me by Youtube last night.

Cool video though, if you are into such nerd stuff.

God works in mysterious ways" and all that... — AmadeusD

That may be, but it is harder to convince people to worship the god of baffling with bullshit.

In principle, they do. They acknowledge God has all-encompassing power. Why would deluding us or merely providing odd empirical data to our minds be outside that? Although, in this case it wouldn't be Odd. It would be the case, and nothing more. — AmadeusD

Christians typically think that God, being good, wouldn't mislead us.

:up:

What's the catch there? I don't really understand the correlation, so I can't pick out the problem. — AmadeusD

Ohms law is v=i*r where
v represents Voltage
i represents electrical current
and r represents electrical resistance

So for any given resistance, the relationship between voltage and current would be graphed as a straight line at some angle.

Fluid flow is much different with something more like p=r*q^2 where
p represents pressure
q represents flow rate
and r represents something crudely analogous to electrical resistance we can call "pipe-resistance".

Graphing p vs q for a given pipe-resistance (according to this simplistic equation) would result in a parabolic curve.

Fluid flow is actually even more complicated than that, so keep in mind this is merely a crude approximation. However, an aspect of the situation with fluids, is that the energy required to move fluid through pipes tends to go up as the square of the flow rate.

Where do you stand on the possibility of consciousness emerging from collections of pipes, vales, water, etc.? Even I would grant that it's logically possible. But suppose we have an infallible consciousness meter, and (bear with me) someone has created a planet-sized system of valves, pipes, pumps, water, etc. that is functionally equivalent to a working brain. I would give astronomical odds that when we point the consciousness meter at the plumbing, it's not going to register anything. What kind of odds would you give? — RogueAI

I don't see any reason to think such a system couldn't in principle be conscious, but it would be an extremely low temporal resolution sort of consciousness, and would require an enormous input of energy to power the pumps. This is related to what I pointed out Kastrup showing ignorance about, with his claim that the relationship between fluid flowrate and pressure, is the same as the relationship between voltage and current expressed by Ohms law.

So your conciousness detector would need to be able to detect a consciousness, for which one of our years was but a moment.

You mean M. Scott Peck? I did read Road Less Travelled in the 90's, one of my favourites. — Wayfarer

Yeah, we've discussed it before. The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, as the name might suggest, has a lot of relevance to the workings of a community such as TPF.

It's such a shame this thread still exists, I honestly thought after the jan 6th atrocity and his election wipeouts it would be all consigned to the past. — Wayfarer

BTW, it's a shame you never read The Different Drum. It provides a lot of perspective good for a forum moderator to have.

I don't think it was too long. — Wayfarer

You haven't seen his response yet. :chin:

If, by 'laws of reality' you mean 'natural law' or 'scientific law', are these themselves physical? — Wayfarer

If Christoffer responds to this and tries to correct your misconceptions, do you consider it likely that you will be inclined to tell him that his response was too long?

If so, it would be considerate to say so now.

It fits well with General Relativity as well.

It exists in the past. Physicalism states that only physical things exist. My the past exists in minds. Therefore, it must actually exist, as an actual physical thing (that it has passed, i suppose is no matter to the principle - either could be argued by whomeveer held the view) — AmadeusD

On a perdurance view you would be a four dimensional being, with one of those dimensions being the time dimensions of spacetime. So from such a perspective, yes you have temporal extension.

Of course it is your brain is processing the data from your eyes. But it's still a cat, and it's still just a line. Thinking that the cat is no more than a bit of data processing misses its place in the artist's creation, the web page's design, the post I just presented and the argument about emergence.

Indeed, thinking of it as nothing more than your brain processing the data from your eyes is exactly the error that this thread is about. — Banno

What you say there is just you jumping to the conclusion that my view is much more simplistic than it actually is. I responded to you with a focus on the cat, because you yourself brought up the cat specifically.

Of course, I understand that we can associate a wide variety of things that we might wish to talk about, with the image. (And that is just another thing that is quite understandable, given a connectionist perspective.)

You seem to have a rather, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain." thing going on here. And your comment seems more gotcha rhetoric, than something I'd expect from a person willing to consider that he might have something to learn.

Look at my icon carefully. I could not have planned it and then created the necessary math, in my wildest dreams. — jgill

What are the axes of your drawing?

I'm used to thinking of (1,0j) as on the right hand side. I assume that is rotated 90° from my accustomed orientation. Is that correct?

There's a third type of emergence, more psychological than physical. The cat emerges from the single line: — Banno

This assumes psychological is other than physical.

In any case, neural network pattern recognition is highly fault tolerant, and that is why we are able to 'recognize a cat' when looking at that line.