Well, that's a bit of a relief. Now we have to hope poorer countries get enough vaccines so as to stop new variants from arising.

Yes. And I think Schopenhauer was quite acute in making that observation. Somehow, at bottom, we are all one thing. Somehow the appearance of difference emerged with sufficient cognitive capacities.

. I'm not convinced the question "But what are they, really?" is not nonsensical, even though it may seem sensical enough. It relies on the idea of an omniscient mind which could exhaustively know what things truly are in a kind of absolutely total way. — Janus

'What are they really' presupposes a perseptive-less view or an omniscient view of all possible lived experience of all living creatures experiencing a "similar object". My thought is more, what grounds these appearances? Structures, negative noumena, will? One can say "well it's all atoms and fields at bottom". But from our representations of objects all the way down to atoms, there is a massive gap in our knowledge.

Imagine being in front of a tree with all senses. You lose sight, the tree is still there. You can touch it, hear it, etc. Now lose touch. You can still hear it, taste it if you like. But keep on going. You lose your traditional five senses. But we can't deny an object exists out there.

The problem I see with saying we make everything up and that idealism is the case, is that it doesn't work at all without a God or some such entity, something that guarantees that we all see the same things. Absent a deity it seems to be an idea incapable of explaining anything at all. — Janus

We have essentially the same genes, and one human being can be used in experiments, as a substitute for the whole species when it comes studying perception, or medication and so on. Why would we drastically experience a different world, people with severe cognitive problems aside?

We just project the world entirely. But don't have enough knowledge to see how we do this. I don't believe this at all, but it's what remains if we don't postulate a structure, etc.

structures and events we perceive, although obviously not known exhaustively, are real and somehow isomorphic with what is independent of us and our perceptions and judgements. But we are always pushing the limits of language, so if we don't attempt to speak from "beyond ourselves" we will save ourselves from uttering what is pretty much useless nonsense. — Janus

Then it is a mere difference on the use of our words. A structure or an event unperceived by a conscious being capable of making these discriminations is not too different from things-themselves.

Beyond this, structures or things or whatever you want to call it, our knowledge is indeed in very shaky grounds. But if something akin to this is not postulated, I don't see how we avoid saying that we make everything up and are left with pure idealism.

I think we could clarify these notions by speaking about what they can't be.

I suspect such notions are contrasted with a priori knowledge - a complicated subject, which I'm trying to clear up.

Funny how hard "naïve realism" turns out to be!

It makes sense given those circumstances.

I'm confused. I would've sworn in another conversation we had that you thought the idea was useful.

I currently re-reading Cudworth, a persecutor to Kant, who stated a similar doctrine almost 100 years before the Critique was published. It's very interesting.

He say that of these things themselves, we feel only motion - effects the objects induce in us, specifically to creatures like us, that we then attribute all this richness we take for granted. The idea being there was something here prior to us existing, but it cannot be defined using the concepts we apply to nature.

But there's also Schopenhauer, who says that the-thing-in-itself is will, energy, the same thing you feel when you move your arm is what it would be like to be anything else in the universe, if it were conscious.

So there's no need to say that things in themselves are completely, 100% unknowable. Perceiving effects, feeling as a subject and object or using the idea as a limiting notion, so as to not postulate a relational ontology ad infinitum, are useful and have content, to me anyway.

So it depends on how you take these ideas. I would agree, if we can know nothing at all about it, then the idea is not too useful.

Why is that surprising? It's a novelty and they still get food.

I think we're assuming surprises must be negative or have negative connotations.

I don't doubt that experiment, but I don't see what is revealing about it. What the alternative, because the mice get food in a different pattern, they're just not going to eat?

Conditions for those experiments are a bit suspect. They put a mouse in a cage with a lever containing some kind of drug. With nothing else to do, bored to exasperation, they'll pull the lever: it could be good or it could be bad. It's better than endless staying still.

When they recreate these experiments in a social setting, with many mice containing other stimulating things like small mounds and wheels and the like, barely any mouse opts for the lever. Some do, but a very small amount, which sounds correct given a sample group.

It's not clear based on what they say. Perhaps we should distinguish surprise from stimulus and think of it as a kind of continuum. An organism would want to avoid surprises, meaning life-threatening situations, while seeking stimulus, a way to channel and then release energy.

Unless one stipulates that surprises must be avoided for survival. Then perhaps surprise is a bad term and we'd need a new one, such as "threat".

If life is the complexification of processes that lead to ever more elaborate organisms, given the right atmospheric conditions, then the first life to emerge would be quite "stupid" and have an incredibly poor model of the world.

On these conditions, the dark room would not matter, the organism would just "do stuff", to release energy and go back to oblivion. This tendency of doing stuff for the sake of it would carry on to most species as a residue of very primitive impulses. A dark room provides no stimulus and no potential reward. It would be safe, until the organism starves.

Better to release that energy doing something, while trying to be mindful of minimal safety precautions. Everything is going to perish anyway so, there's not much risk. In the grand scheme of things, living a few more months or years, is nothing compared to experiencing many things in a short time frame.

We can get stuck on Kant, which is fine, there's lots of stuff there.

We can also simplify a bit while still being as accurate as we can be and we say there are "things themselves" which play a role is cementing my experience of the world.

What we know and are familiar with is what we take to be our ordinary image of the world: rivers, trees, clouds, birds, etc. But to attribute these very same things to the world, absent our ordering and classification is not coherent.

Of things themselves we are only acquainted with effects, which feed into an innate structure that attributes, not only "thatness" to items, but colours, smells, etc., not to mention the concepts which we use so (seemingly) effortlessly.

But we cannot go behind these, as much as we may want to.

We have two meanings of the word "philosophy", perhaps unfortunately. There's the traditional meaning going back to the Greeks, which many people here are concerned about.

Then there's this whole "philosophy" meaning "what you think about the world" as when a person asks another "what's your philosophy on this situation? or "At Johnnie Walker our philosophy is that..."

Everyone has the latter one, much fewer the traditional meaning. So the adage is true, with the said qualification.

Very interesting and useful. Thanks.

I had in mind ontology and metaphysics, not so much general worldly affairs. In that respect, who we are, what's going to happen, what should I do and so on, well yes, a lot of people are interested in that.

When we speak about the foundations of knowledge or of objects, then the topic becomes one of reduced interest: "pointless questions", "naval gazing", etc.

People do have a general curiosity yes, but I think that, given the capacities we have to understand the universe to some extent, it is not appreciated nearly enough. Then again, we are all different and I get that.

Yeah. Even in questions which we could make some progress or elucidate the topics, it will only appeal to very few people. I have in mind something like Schopenhauer's will or Descartes dualism. One can give arguments for or against these things, but not many people care.

I suppose some do like the basics of physics, atoms, black holes and the like. But much else is just not very relevant to the common man.

No matter how you slice it, this here is a minority game. Yep, nature loves to be a big tease. I don't know why, not like she cares.

Welp, we'll see how much this omicron varient has already spread. It seems to me that once they've detected it as a new strain, it's already too late.

It's been almost two years with this thing already. We may have another interesting year next year.

Time flies...

“Neural Correlates in Gratitude”? Really? When was the last time you consulted your neurons? For anything? — Mww

:lol:

Damn man, you're firing on all cylinders today. Reread Allais' interpretation of Kant - the best one there is currently. It's very interesting.

As for 'being', either we're employing a very general word with rather vague conceptions, or we use it in a technical sense meaning something particular. To say that everything has being is a bit like saying everything is. OK.

I now suspect an ontology only arises within the context of one's studies and can't be generalized to everything, without losing consistency in some other sub-system.

Anyway, interesting exchange with Joshs.

It's impossible to say. It's also astonishing how quickly we've learned so much, we've only had about, what, 300 to 400 years of science. Imagine if we had discovered it earlier, where would we be now?

What makes these people geniuses was that, despite rhetoric from certain public intellectuals, they saw and understood a lot given what they had.

I highly doubt that if you take even the most prestigious physicist today and sent him back in time, would be able to make such contributions as Aristotle or Descartes or Hume. She would only be able to develop on field of knowledge extensively, but this field does not cover most of what we're interested: psychology, sociology, ethics, epistemology, etc., etc.

Is the mind in what is understood, or in the way in which it understands? — Pantagruel

I'd say the latter. The mind (though we should speak of persons actually, not mind) is what the mind is capable of doing and understanding, what is understood happens to coincide with a mind like ours.

I'm not going to give you the "left wing" spiel you've probably heard thousands of times.

I'll only limit my comments to saying that the institutions themselves are not the problem, it's the way they're used. Free markets - if they exist - would be good for trade. It would not be a good idea for a society, to think of a society like a market.

Central planning - in so far as they can reflect the will of the majority - can be good for setting laws most people would agree to, such as having a police force of some kind, a universal justice system and so on. But it would also not be a good idea to foster the mentality of leaders in a society.

But these terms are so loaded, they impede communication just as frequently, if not more so, than they can get a message across.

It's not easy under any circumstance. I think minority rights could be respected in a more democratic society, but there's no guarantee.



If they don't depend on any resources from others, then they could do without certain aspects of central planning. Of course, this depends on if we are picturing an ideal-ish society or what can be done within our current system.

If we limit ourselves to the latter, we're going to have less choices to be creative about it.

The problem is not central planning per se, institutions are made by people, not laws of physics. The issue with how central planning has been carried out in many places, is that it becomes a place in which decisions are cemented to society by a class of people who think they should be the ones to run things.

This very much happens in market societies all the time, only that there's more smoke and mirrors involved. But it's the same concept of thinking that a few people know more than the rest of the population on what they should want or have.

I think there should be loose-ish centers in which people decide what rules they want in society. One would only need as much central planning as is necessary and not more. You can't avoid large institutions, but you can temper the power they have to reflect the will of the majority.

There are different notions of nothing too. One thing is to say there can't be "nothing" in the universe, there's always a quantum vacuum, which is something or sorts.

But we also have the nothing of ordinary life, as in, before I was born, I wasn't anything nor will I be anything after death. There isn't anything for me to grasp when I'm not here. That's a legitimate use of the word.

Now, how can the Permanent Existent be something definite, like continuous points with this as a continuous 3D wave field, given that it has no beginning and thus no direction or design to it? It's likely that there isn't anything simpler, given that it has to be partless to be fundamental. — PoeticUniverse

That's an attractive idea, of finding something which can't be simpler. That makes some sense. The thing is, we need evidence to postulate this as something that happened, instead of leaving it up as a possibility. This is fine too, but we should remember that we are speaking of something that may not exist.

Maybe there was always something. Our best science can only predict up close to the big bang. Then it breaks down.

But from the big bang to "before" if, that makes any sense, which is not clear, we have no clue. Perhaps, and contrary to all our intuitions, something can come out of nothing, given enough "time", which didn't exist prior to the big bang, supposedly. Or maybe it existed in a manner which is beyond us.

Or the multiverse could be a possibility.

The point being that we likely don't have intelligence enough to understand why there is something or why there should be a beginning or an infinity.

Some physicists now argue that something is more plausible than nothing. The laws of physics may well indicate this and it may be true. Doesn't take away from the fact that in conception, for us, it is extremely natural and much easier to understand "nothing existing" than something. No effort is required.

But we don't know. You could be right as well.

I am also above my abilities here, but that's never stopped a discussion, so, I'll ask:

Shouldn't the second law of thermodynamics be called a "habit" instead of a law? It seems to me to speak of a tendency to disorder, not an iron-clad rule.

We are here after all, so there are pockets or order within disorder, or something.

The Morning Star - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Re-reading:

Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and his Realism by Lucy Allais

It's a good question and again, I think that part of it has to do with what naïve realism imples for you. If it implies that stones and rivers would be as they are exactly as they appear, absent people, then I think naïve realism is problematic.

I wouldn't say a stone itself has colour absent or, or texture. For that to happen there needs to be a creature who appreciates or distinguished these things.

On the other hand, you make a good point. I think we switch from realism to something else once we enter physics, that is, we use mathematics to discover what physics is doing and mathematics seems to be of a different nature than perception.

But do we have good reasons to believe that the stuff mathematics is describing is accurate or true? I think that we do, given its results.

Yes, we need to observe the stone, otherwise we have no data to work with. When we investigate in close detail what this stone is made of, we discover it is made of colourless, odourless, insubstantial particles. So the stone is made of stuff that lacks the qualities we attribute to them in ordinary life.

So close investigation reveals the stone to be a projection, yet without this projection, we wouldn't be able to get to the stuff that makes up the stone.

Hence the paradox. As I understand it.

It depends on what naïve realism is taken to mean. The way discussed in the OP looks to me as a variety of realism. Naïve realism is the view is that that tree over there and that river exist exactly as I take them to be, even if all human beings are gone. But then we know objects themselves don't have colours nor sounds, etc.

In this latter sense, as Bertrand Russell said:

"The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself... Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naïve realism is false. Therefore naïve realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.”

So we have a tension here.

So I think it boils down to how naivety is taken to be.

But I don't see AOC kicking anyone, being disrespectful or otherwise "asking for it." She's been acting like a lady, and respectful, just speaking some truth: if that hurts some Republican or challenges his masculinity, tough. He's the pussy. Let Trump grab him. — James Riley

Agree, although Republicans distort even this as if she were speaking rudely.

Anyway, I know full well I sound like a sexist POS but that's the way I roll. I don't want to see her end up like Hillary or Nancy or Mitch McConnel. They got tough, which is not bad, but they also got conniving. Sad, really. — James Riley

I don't think it's sexist, it makes sense to me. I doubt she will turn into Nancy, though one never knows. Just look at the complete 180 Tulsi Gabbard did in like 3 or 4 months, that's kinda disgusting.

When I look back at what I just said, I realize how naïve and stupid I sound. It is, after all, politics. I guess that's why I stay out the kitchen: I can't handle the heat. :lol: Good luck to her (and Bernie). — James Riley

It's politics. We need all types of views. Nothing wrong with how you see things. I agree with it.

He is. I'm not a fan, but I have to give him credit he is quite capable.

If AOC were a man, she would not get nearly as much crap. I'm pretty confident about that.

But once the table manners return, it's time to settle down and act like adults. For Trump, being a jerk was not a tactic, but an actual personality/character trait. — James Riley

Of course, you can be honest (while still maintaining decency) outside of official office hours, but once inside, just behave as expected. Bernie is good with this, I like AOC here (though some people hate her to an extreme which is crazy to me).

They can call her a communist or socialist all they want, but she would literally belong to the right wing in most European countries such as Germany, France, Spain - they don't argue against universal healthcare or maternity leave. These days they may want to trim it down in these countries, but they would not dream of privatizing it, they would vanish in hours.

Yep. He does say what a lot of people think. And I won't lie to you and say I did not thoroughly enjoy Trump destroying the other Republican candidates back in 2016 in the primaries, I loved it.

But then he won. And that became a problem. Man, to think people would want boring politicians back sure is something!

Yes, China has said so, and given the history of China in the 20th century, I get that perspective and I have no reason to believe they are bluffing.

People in power do have to deal with nukes, but I highly doubt most sane citizens would want those used, I mean they're not supposed to be used at all, the point of having them is deterrence not attack.

All I'm saying that it's a dangerous game of chicken to be playing. It's bad enough that China and the US are doing military exercises in the South China sea, but if you get other countries copying the US in the same territory, that's considerably different. To be clear, I don't think most of the world cares about Taiwan to THAT degree (the exceptions being China and Taiwan, obviously) , it's more a manner of pride.

In any case, it's stupid.

I think we should relate to nature in a manner of mutual respect. Not adoration, despite our destruction of the environment, after all if most of us were dropped in the middle of the jungle we would almost surely die. Nor should we forget earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, etc.

But, nature does provide and nurture and inspire too. And while this is suffering, one must imagine instances of joy too: mass suicide is just not common after all.

So it's tricky. We need to respect nature, defends ourselves from it and not destroy it anymore.

Sure. It's just that some parents think kids should have guns is a sign of love.

I talk about nukes with some frequency, people say "oh that's so horrible nothings going to happen because of it" and it stays this way.

People disagree about objective facts now, so it's not possible to include "everybody" on a single political cause. Society can surely feel (and in some places is) quite isolated, but I suppose there's something anyone can do. Whether this something amounts to anything, who knows?

Everybody does. It's the profit makers that differ.

I don't think any rival state would dream of starting a war with the US.

A nuclear war could break out. Everybody loses.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this, but I think it is likely I agree with it. — dclements

It's a secret :rofl:

uncomfortable with our near neo-imperialism enough to sometime believe we are not so much always the good guys but someone that is barely tolerated considering the alternative. — dclements

If Europe had its own separate army from NATO, then things might be a little different. The US would still have BY far the biggest army in the world but, they'd have to deal with Europe somehow or consider them in some manner.

The only "threats" to the US vision is China, Russia and Iran, because they don't do what they're told. Granted China and Russia have nukes, so, it's a dangerous game to play.

The powers that be in China either can't or don't want to look impotent in standing up to the West and the US and her allies are not willing to look the other way for too long with China's posturing for trying to stand up to the US and become a super power on equal footing.

What is it that they say about when an unmovable object meets a irresistible force? IMHO, we are seeing a similar situation play out between the US an China lately. — dclements

China is surrounded by hostile power: Japan, Korea, Taiwan all have considerable US support.

I forgot who said it, but if you look at a map of China, the only way they can expand with least cost to them is precisely towards the South China Sea, but Taiwan is blocking them. And there's the whole re-unification issue, which is sensitive to China.

But I agree, it's too silly to be playing military exercise games. The stakes are too high.

That my fears are clearly not unfounded.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/10/china-holds-military-exercises-slams-us-legislators-taiwan-visit

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3155908/china-will-keep-escalating-military-intimidation-taiwan-experts?module=inline&pgtype=article

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-allies-would-take-action-if-taiwan-attacked-blinken-2021-11-10/

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2021/11/15/2003767889

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/15/us-china-taiwan-biden-xi-virutal-meeting

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/taiwan-submarines-11112021142036.html

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/red-line-us-dangerous-ploy-against-china/news-story/55187d52501a68f1d283e5f24691fd8e

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/as-drums-of-war-beat-cool-heads-needed-in-uschina-conflict/news-story/eb942c9c9cb15858339f3deaac80bbe4

Yeah. Very much so. :roll: