Shouldn't any worldview or culture and state be separated.? — Hillary

No, simply because ideology is required to hold a state together.

I’m saying I feel like I’ve been indoctrinated into this idea of the separation of church and state being a “good” thing because I live in the US. And maybe it is. But it is hard to separate the "secular" from the "religious" in any case. — Paulm12

How is it hard? Can you give an example?

The separation of church and state is a good thing if you believe that citizens should have religious freedom, if for no better reasons.

if the alternative to religious philosophy is nihilism or materialism, then I'll always pick the former. — Wayfarer

It may be the only alternative for some people. It is certainly not the only alternative for everyone.

But I also wonder if I grew up in a theocracy if that would be the system of government I support. — Paulm12

Then you’re against religious freedom?

Separation of church and state doesn't mean we exclude religious values, it means we exclude religious institutions from government.
— T Clark

Sorry - I should point out that my personal experience of democracy is external to the US system. I wasn’t referring to the ‘separation of church and state’ as such, but to its common (mis)interpretation as the ideal of secularism: as Wayfarer pointed out, the difference between ‘freedom of’ and ‘freedom from’ religion.

I think where the US struggles is in recognising this distinction. So I agree with you here, and I think that secularism should not be presented as the ideology behind ‘the separation of church and state’ at all. They’re not supposed to mean the same thing. That was kind of my point. — Possibility

How does the US struggle to recognize the distinction? The US is not an anti-religious state. Neither the Bible nor books by Richard Dawkins are banned in the US.

Strangers asking for directions in the street and co-workers passing pens to each other across the room are examples of incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life?

And in contemporary societies?

Importantly, being free of market-dependency doesn't mean getting rid of markets tout court. I'm not sure that would be either possible nor desirable. But it would mean incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life in a way that does not make the latter depend on the former. — Streetlight

I was wondering if you or anyone else would give examples of incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life.

I posit that the communal resources can be managed sustainably because it is in their self-interest to do so. I believe it because I’ve seen it first hand in a local anarchist community. No rules, no management, no authority, no mechanism, just a community of people engaging in common enterprise on the land they loved. Their economy consisted of fishing and foraging, tourism, trading trinkets with other communities, and believe it or not, professional surfing. All of this occurred out of the prying eyes of state interference…or so they thought. As soon as the state caught wind of their dealings they were forced to leave and their dwellings were burned to the ground. — NOS4A2

I’m curious about this community. Some island, I assume, but where???

Btw, states have always had a tendency to take over.

NOS, advocating "separation of state and economy" – pure ideology (Žižek) – is no less delusional than the notion of "separation of structure and dynamics" in engineering (or no less incoherent than "separation of mind and body" in theology / metaphysics). — 180 Proof

Finished The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende today. The two Daughter of Fortune sequels before that.

Our words do not "lock on to our metal representations" because if this were granted, then there could be no such thing as our representations; there could only be your representations and my representations. There could be no agreement, no correction of those mental models because there would be nothing else but those models. — Banno

It works out because we belong to the same institution.

The game of chess has its own tiny reality, with driving goals, rules, a playing field, etc. The bishop and the rook both know the board and play according to the rules or the game will lose order and degenerate into chaos. Take a big mental step backwards. We have our own teeny-tiny reality with drives, rules, a playing field, etc. Like the bishop and the rook, we can’t say anything about what is beyond our teeny-tiny reality.

Brute facts can be shown and said. Here, hold this piece of lead in one hand, and this piece of wood in the other. See how they feel different? We call this difference weight, and further, the difference in weight of objects of the same size we call density. Things like this show how our words "lock onto" the world around us. — Banno

I think the trouble I’m having is that I don’t think that words lock onto the world around us (objective idealism?) but lock onto our mental representations or model of the world.

Status function:
Lead and wood count as matter in reality.

But is reality “the world around us” or is it only our model of reality?

what constitutes a correct aesthetic experience
— skyblack

I'm looking forward to finding out if I am doing it correctly. — T Clark

:rofl:

I do not think anyone here actually thinks words could, by some "spell", make lead less dense than wood. — Banno

It’s not magic but simply lack of experience or honesty. Mere words can flatten the earth. Maybe true brute facts are our own experiences.

We don’t need to identify something for it to exist. — Michael

I assume you mean because it has been previously identified and we can re-cognize it.

Quantum particles can't distinguish themselves? — Hillary

Good question. I'll do the math.



:chin: Think I forgot to carry the one somewhere.

Things don’t need to be distinguished from other things to exist. — Michael

I don't think we can identify something without distinguishing it from what it's not, and even then the same thing could be identified differently depending on the context of the thing. An O could be a letter in the alphabet or an O in tic tac toe, for example.

The concept of paper doesn't exist without people but paper exists without people. — Michael

Doesn’t but does exist… maybe you mean that something exists, like quantum particles for instance, but how are those particles distinguished from other particles without people?

There is no money if there are no people, but there will be paper. — Michael

The concept of paper exists without people?

But we still need to agree on brute facts. I may doubt my own experiences but in the absence of others there’s no one to agree or disagree with. Indeed in many occasions people may disregard brute facts in favor of “alternative facts”. Maybe the only true brute facts are our own experiences.

The more you think about it the more it seems that, besides our own experiences, all fact are social or institutional (patterns of organization) facts.

l want to group the meaning-free relativistic dizzying "post modernism" and modernism — Eskander

I want to group premodern with postmodern. That would be wild! :starstruck:

But Status Functions allow this. We collectively "declare" today Wednesday, and repeat this each week, resulting in the social fact of week days, which you and I can use to make plans, but which are unavailable to Fido. — Banno

Doesn’t everything have a status?

This piece counts as a bishop in chess.
This cord counts as a leash in walking.
A circle counts as a o in English.
A circle counts as a zero in math.
A circle counts as a o in tic tac toe.

if you go back far enough in time, art was thought of as just the direct impressing of the world upon the mind. — Joshs

There are of course modern concepts of perception and they continue to develop as we learn more about the world and ourselves.

It's unclear what you mean by "direct impressing of the world upon the mind". It seems to mean that ancient people could only record their perceptions and therefore their art could only be representational. If I'm not mistaken, some of the oldest art known is thought to be depictions of some kind of mother-earth spirit. Sculptures of a subject that they didn't actually perceive with their senses.

The technical has to do with the applied, and the applied is a reshuffling within an extant theoretical edifice. Steve Jobs introduced brilliant technical innovations but added nothing to the existing scientific theory underlying
it. Great art isn’t just application of extant theory, it is the creation of new theory, a new vision. — Joshs

Starting from impressionism the progression was basically > post-impressionism > cubism. If you're saying there's a "new theory" behind each of these stages, what are they?

Consider a group of Harvard Business School students on graduation day.

In one possible world, they each individually decide to go out into the world and make as much money as possible, for the good of humanity.

In the other, they meet and agree to go out into the world and make as much money as possible, for the good of humanity.

Are these two different? Well, it seems that in the first, each says "I am going out to get rich". In the second, "We are going out to get rich". We-intentionality is different to I-intentionality. — Banno

I was thinking how language is unnecessary for we-intentionality. For example, my dog and I both have mental representations of ‘going for a walk’, though our respective mental models of ‘going for a walk’ may differ to some degree. I can have the intention to walk the dog and as I prepare for that activity there will be some point where Red (my dog) will recognize the cues and we will then have we-intentionality. So I guess the institution of walking that we share is represented by a sequence of events involving a leash, shoes, a hat, and other signs. The signs are representations with intention but not the thing represented so are fictional.

If someone told me they were going to duplicate and replace my brain with a mechanical one (and dispose of the organic one), I would consider that death. However, if they could replace it incrementally and guarantee I was conscious the whole time, I don't consider that death, Does anyone else share this intuition? — RogueAI

I don’t think it matters at all if you were conscious. We lose consciousness all the time and still manage to retain our identity. A more interesting question is if the copy were altered somehow, think Manchurian candidate, and your new self wouldn’t realize the difference. The perfect sleeper agent.

One act of censorship is a thousand-fold more destructive than any sentence ever uttered. — NOS4A2

And Putin gave the order, “Nuke the fuckers.”

You said you sincerely hope his ideas have not been absorbed by today’s atheistic thinkers, which implies that you have an understanding of his philosophy of Will to Power. Can you summarize what it consists of? — Joshs

I’m skeptical if even the Neitch himself could do that to everyone’s satisfaction. I also suspect that may be by design.

One can’t understand his theory of art without first understanding his larger philosophical project, becuase the two are co-determinative. — Joshs

Of course art is related to aesthetics but we’re really talking about aesthetics, right?

You said his theory of art was unoriginal, and his theory of art is derived from his main thesis, Will to Power. — Joshs

I still don’t know what his theory of art is. Can you explain it?

Regarding aesthetics, people have been having sublime aesthetic experiences and transcending the duality of good and evil for thousands of years.

That explains why you think he’s unoriginal — Joshs

??? I never said he was unoriginal.

Do you think Nietzsche’s ideas as a whole have been absorbed, at least by most atheistic thinkers? — Joshs

I sincerely hope not.

How would this work? — Tom Storm

It doesn’t, but in theory it would be a movement away from materialistic rationalization (efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control) and towards well-being and meaning, but not capital M Meaning, because as the Neitch infamously said, God is dead.

Aesthetics to counteract rationalization in society, essentially.

It's nothing new this day and age, is what I meant.

Jackson, being about as useful as Anne Frank's drum-kit, forced me to seek the answer for myself so I let my fingers do some googling and discovered after a few minutes of reading that the Nietch thought something to the effect that aesthetic experience might just fill the God-shaped hole left in the wake of modernity or, to put it another way, serve as the key to unlock the iron cage of reason.

Nietzsche famously proclaimed that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”

I suppose this was revolutionary thinking back in the old-timey days of the nineteenth century.

Riddle? Just say you did not understand it. — Jackson

:grin: I thought that’s what I did say. No help?

The idea that art is about production goes back to Aristotle:

"Now action is for the sake of an end; therefore the nature of
things also is so. Thus if a house, e.g., had been a thing made by nature, it would
have been made in the same way as it is now by art; and if things made by nature
were made not only by nature but also by art, they would come to be in the same
way as by nature. The one, then, is for the sake of the other; and generally art in
some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates
nature." (Aristotle, Physics; 199a9-19)

Notice, "art...completes what nature cannot bring to a finish." — Jackson

I was never good with Greek riddles.

Maybe the meaning is that art is the creative act? If so, I’ll point out that creativity isn’t exclusive to art production, and also that art can be reproduced without creativity.

it is about meaning and the production of meaning. — Jackson

I just don’t see how this is in any way a radical idea.