Yeah, I agree with that framing - it is quite sensible and ought to be factual- but it apparently sounds contentious for some reason. Some people get uncomfortable with the idea of mental construction, as if objectivity is thereby rendered suspect or inexistant.

The issue that arises here, then, is whether there is an external world or not. I don't know of any idealist - save for one, an obscure British philosopher - who denies the existence of the world. But I don't understand Hegel, nor am I compelled to read him.

My criticism here is that If materialism is true, then the brain is not merely a "mental construction" even if our models of it, and perhaps even our perceptions of it, are mental constructions (idealism) or brain generated models (materialism). — Janus

It may be more than merely a mental construction, but it is at least a mental construction, or we would have no way to perceive or model it. I presume you know Russell's quote on this topic, and he was not an idealist. But what he says is factual as far as I can see.

According to materialism, there would be some mind-independent functional structures which appear to us as brains, and what we experience as thoughts are on the level of the physical brain, neuronal processes — Janus

Who ascribes these functions? We do. What does a brain do? It produces consciousness, but it does many things which are unrelated to consciousness which are equally important. Why privilege consciousness over many of the other things brains do?

On the other hand according to idealism, the brain is merely one among all the other ideas which are taken by materialists to be mind-independently real functional structures, but are really, through and through, mental constructions.. — Janus

You have mentioned structures several times. I can understand epistemic structural realism in physics, but above that, say in biology and so on, I don't quite follow what you are saying.

At least you are framing something which can be discussed that materialism means mind independent structure and that idealism denies that. That's a big improvement over usual conversations on these topics.

This talk of idealism vs. materialism pops up all the time, but it is rarely defined. Or if it is, the definitions seem to me to be unsatisfactory.

Roughly speaking:

Idealism: everything is a product of mind.

Materialism: everything is made of physical stuff.

What is this supposed clash? Is the mind not coming out of a brain? Is the brain not a mental construction based on sense data?

So what prevents one from being incompatible with the other? That matter can't think? That's factually false and is relying on old (but justified at the time) Cartesian intuitions.

Or alternatively that mind is above matter? What does this even mean? I find no meaning in this assertion. The problem that can be posed is the problem of the world, either it exists absent us or it does not. That is a legitimate question, because it can be meaningfully debated.

Another question that can be meaningfully debated is how much of the world is a construction of the mind. But the alleged rift or incompatibility between idealism and materialism is merely verbal.

Yes. It becomes a very big "meta" problem - hallucinations get clocked in as facts (this is already happening) and other AI's use the hallucinated data as fact, amplifying its abundance and stretching its reliability.

They're slated to run out of trainable data next year, until paywalled sources open up.

I don't know man, the tools are impressive in many ways, but being forced to use it in everything can't be good. One has to imagine that this will have massive negative ramifications down the line...

To make the question more direct and concrete, what philosophy writing will make your writing survive better through the ages, what philosophy writing will receive little in the way of fame, praise, or hostility? — ProtagoranSocratist

It's hard to predict. Hume was basically ignored until after his death, he was known mostly as a historian. Not too disimilar from Leibniz who was marginalized and mocked - save a few exceptions like Kant or Schopenhauer- until Bertrand Russell brought him back from the trenches of history with his book on Leibniz.

We have Plato because we got lucky, somehow his body of work survived. I believe we lost 2/5's of Aristotle's writings, and we have almost nothing of the books he wanted to publish (in dialogue form), which were said to be "rivers of gold".

We have fragments of the pre-Socratics, again luck.

Herbert de Cherbury, one of the central antagonists of Locke, probably the one who caused him to write part I of his Essay, was because he was reacting to Cherbury. Ask if anyone knows about him today. Getting a copy of his book in English is difficult, to say the least.

Peirce we have because James and Dewey mentioned several times in writing and some people decided it was worth ordering his notes, otherwise we'd have mere articles.

C.I. Lewis, the person who brought in the term "qualia" into contemporary philosophy is barely known and he's quite interesting.

You get the idea. There are equal examples of people who were famous back in the day but are now relegated as historical curiosity. Just write what you find interesting, hope others like it. Not much more can be done. Much treasure has to be looked for, just as there is a lot of junk.

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño

I guess that this may have been mentioned. One thing is AI use in this place. But damn, it's everywhere. I had to get an extension to block it from always appearing in Google searches. Getting "answers" from secondary sources (the AI using the primary source) can only lead to more "mutations" increasing errors.

AI use can be perfectly fine. But there is something to be said about too much of it all the time.

There must be a connection to certain trains of thought, otherwise we wouldn't be able to think or reason. How much of these thoughts are based on connective tissue of a previous thought as opposed to having thoughts floating in the imagination (to borrow Hume's framing) is impossible to delineate.

As for a cause- that may be different. Hitting a billiard ball causing another billiard ball to move is quite reliable, but to argue that, say, thinking about climate change leads to depression reliably, while true, is vastly more complex. There are many more variables as to what constitutes depression than the regularity in which a ball causes another ball to move.

True - though he admitted he did not have the gift for writing that Hume or Mendelsohn had.

Some of his writing in his Prolegomena is much better than his Critique material, but only in instances.

I am saying that outside of ordinary use of these words, we have no technical definitions of "believing", "knowing" or "thinking". Unless you argue that knowledge is justified true belief, which is unconvincing.

Having said this, on ordinary usage, belief and thought are different. A belief may be true or false. It has a residue of faith to it as well.

A thought may be many things and need not correspond to anything external, as in thinking about a flying mountain, which whatever else it is, is hard to argue is a belief.

That's a wonderful quote. And he's quite right.

Well - some philosophers of certain traditions seem to me to speak gobbledygook (the postmodernists: Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, Guatarri, etc.) so no amount of more writing - or less, would help much.

Welcome to the forum!

As for premise 1: Epistemically, belief and thought are identical.

This needs clarification. What is a belief? What is a thought?

As far as I can see you have stipulated that they are identical but have not given an argument as to why they are identical.

Once you tell us what they are then maybe we can proceed to argue about these topics.

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

Yep! That was quite a performance - on many levels. Hadn't read a book quite like it ever.

I'm glad you are enjoying it. When you finish shoot me an @, I'd love to get your impressions. There's a lot to it.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee is probably your best bet. He covers most of the great figures quite accurately in great, easy to grasp prose. I can't think of a better introduction.

His book on Schopenhauer is also very good and will help build more critical thinking skills.

Beyond that, there's a lot of stuff, it depends on what you like. Russell's History of Western Philosophy, though uneven, is a great reference.

Once you see a topic click, you can read intro books, lectures or just begin to read the classics. I think it's important to note that you never really finished with Plato or Descartes or Wittgenstein, it's a lifelong thing. So don't pressure yourself in mastery of the subject. It comes with time and changing perspectives.

Shout out to T Clark for mentioning The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern science by Burtt. Knowing a bit about the history of the time period helps A LOT. What may seem silly to us now, was perfectly reasonable for the time, given what they knew. That's also a good book for the early-modern period in philosophy, which contains the most important figures outside of Antient Greece. It's a great book too.

Dude that books is nutssss.

LLMs are still fancy autocomplete. — Simon Willison

:up:

That's pretty accurate so far as I can tell.

For this place? Absolutely. It degrades conversation, but as Jamal pointed out, that is already banned. Having a specific thread that uses LLM's is fine- it can contain the fire.

I can't give a sermon as to why using them is bad, as I use them - though never here or in any thread or conversation. But I get it and I think it's wise to point out the issues with such things.

One problem is that it is harder to avoid this stuff. It's even hard to use Google now, because the damn AI bot answers instead. As to how crazy this can get, we don't know. I suspect it won't be as bad as alarmists say - because these things are not intelligent, we are - or use to be.

So far, this website has managed to do quite decent work monitoring this stuff- but an outright ban is probably impossible by now.

I didn’t have my glasses on when I saw your post and I read that as “Naval Explosives.” I thought that was an interesting choice until I reread it, this time wearing them. — T Clark

That can happen!

All this is quite subjective, needless to say. Some may think it's just a bloated mess. I think it's the best book I've read. But that's the interesting thing about art- if we all liked the same things, it would be boring.

Though if you like philosophy, poetry, action, political injustice and ambition, I have a hard time imagining it would not be in appreciated in large part. But if difficult-ish prose is a no-go, then yeah, it's a skip.

I gave that to my daughter for Christmas one year. We share a love for it. Have you read “The French Lieutenant’s Woman?” — T Clark

Not yet, it was also recommended to me by @frank. Those are two recommendations so I will have to read it.

I have a massive reading library though so, I'll add it to read sometimes next year. Thanks for the heads up. Fowles was a fantastic novelist.

Sure, if you forgot then I'd say go for it.



Oh cool! I've heard about it, but have not read it yet, thanks for the recommendation.

Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is no.1, hands down. Should be a philosopher's dream. Criminally unknown, imo.

Then in no order: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino (This one is significantly narrower than the others, but its left a very strong impression.)

As for Brothers Karamazov being no.5, well, maybe it still is, its reputation is more than well earned. But I just finished The Magus by John Fowles yesterday and it's vying for the top 5 spot - it's astonishing, still reeling from that experience. I've had a good year with novels. :)

I know many of you here are well read in novels - probably much more so than me. But having just finished The Brothers Karamazov I must say, what an absolute miracle of book! Certainly, among my top 5 books of all time.

I have no more words to say, because they will be meaningless.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Any single on of us? Likely not too much. Maybe some people would be less happy - heck maybe they'd be happier, it's difficult to say.

I'd miss out on everything quite literally. But the universe does not care one way or another.

No. This is science fiction frankly. Way too many assumptions are being made that are highly questionable to say the very least.

Economically yes. Though they do have a looming population decline that is very very serious and that may change the outlook for them. But as of now yes, that is what is happening.

We are in dire need of good leaders in this "West". I see danger all over and escalating. Let's hope it doesn't spiral out of control.

I don't see why we should believe that discourse of the "West" (whatever that means) can no longer be given.

It seems to me that there are quite sensible accounts one can put together about what's happening in the world. It takes a decent amount of searching different people specialize in different domains (foreign policy, economy, domestic policy, international relations, tech, climate change, etc.), but one sees a picture emerging which is frankly very grim.

Now that's one thing, the other is to assume that one is capable of giving a single account of everything that is happening. I don't think any one person can do that, there are too many countries, too many complexities, to expect someone to be able to do this.

But I don't see why that is even necessary.

I like QBism too, but I have no way to verify if my intuitions are correct, because I can't do the physics. An interpretation may sound elegant to us, but this doesn't ensure its correctness.

We like Qbism, others may like the Bohmian theory, or Many Worlds and if you accept the view, then you're going to say it's correct. But we need evidence to establish that, which we are lacking.

Are you talking about the "association of ideas" thing? — J

That's a part of it. But he also talks about how certain ideas cause us to react in certain ways, a lot of it on his Passions and Ethics section of his Treatise.

But I think you want something contemporary, so it might not be what you're looking for.

We interpret things mechanistically, yes. That doesn't mean that the world is the way we interpret it to be. It isn't. That may be part of the reason we find QM so hard to understand, we don't have the type of intuitions that would help up make sense of the phenomena.

And signs are mechanical?

We must think of ourselves in terms of the device and not the other way around — JuanZu

Must? Why?

If you want to do science, sure you do experiments, have a theory, see how the numbers work.

If you want to describe a human being, well. I dunno if you can have a theory about a human being, that's complicated, to say the least.

The apparatus measures, but not with the intention of measuring. It is characteristic of idealism in quantum physics to introduce mental aspects into the apparatus. But these aspects are nowhere to be found. — JuanZu

There is nothing in physics which suggest mind. There is nothing is physics which suggest a lack of mind. We don't know enough about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff to say if it is like mind or unlike mind.

That's a good point. The reduction of mechanism to mathematics itself starts to look more idealist than mechanistic. I would argue that one might consider many forms of ontic structural realism popular among "physicalists" to be a sort of idealism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's exactly right. A lof of these so called "materialists", if you question what it is they believe, end up being very strange materialists, because they have to anchor belief in some extremely abstract mathematical formalisms. How that is related to matter being either dead and stupid or no-nonsense spooky stuff is hard for me to understand.

As if entanglement or non-locality are "no nonsense" or "not spooky". But people like to repeat what they hear.

It's not a ghost in the machine. It's ghosts all the way down.

Modern physics doesn't look machine-like, does it? It's extremely strange, abstract and insubstantial. That looks ghostly to me.

And consciousness? What about the experience of consciousness is "mechanical", colors, sounds, smells, thoughts seem to me to be extremely different from a "machine" in any meaningful way this word may be used.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Have you read Locke or Hume? Hume speaks about this quite a bit (not using modern terminology).

There are others too, but I suppose I'm not clear on what the issue is such that it constitutes a problem.

She was a student of Galen Strawson and he recommended her book, fyi.

Again, I don't think you've misinterpreted anything. I was just pointing out what I think is the more comprehensive account of Kant's epistemology.

It's a suggestion, nothing more.