Thanks!

That's the real truth. :wink:

Yes. Science turned into scienticism makes for very poor philosophy, in fact, leaves most of it out.

As to the world absent people, there are vague notions I have. But it's part of the game of belonging to the human species.

Of course.

In all likelihood, I am quite mistaken in several of my views and beliefs, maybe most of them.

It's not clear to me. You can speak of this topic as you wish, that's not a problem.

We agree on physics.

I think you are using reality in the sense of including everything, which invites all kinds of views and perspectives. This view will depend on our proclivities, inclinations, preferences and biases. It's not so much as I can say you are "wrong" or you say the same to me, it's related to usefulness to each person.

Well, now it depends on what you mean by reality. Do you mean everything ranging from human beings, ideas, Gods, to a rock onto a novel? There's little of explanatory depth when the range is so wide.

If you mean by reality what's fundamental to things and the universe, then physics will tell you a good deal about it, they do and are examining the fundamentals of reality. I just don't think we can pierce "the bottom layer", as it were. This is the area in which some physicists begin saying things like like certain particles arise out of nothing.

Or that the "nothing" we use doesn't exist. I think these are different terms that may signal a point of no further depth of insight. I may be wrong.

I think I'm using this distinction too much, and it perhaps strays from the intended use, but, I think Sellars' distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image is roughly correct, or at least a good step in the right direction of a fundamental distinction.

What you say about different realities would apply to the way we make sense of the world intuitively, but not the way the mind-independent world works. I think there is a way the world works mind-indpendently, and physics gets us as close as we can to know what it is. But I don't think physics reaches the final causes of things, it is beyond what physics is intended to do.

But if you are comfortable or believe that there is only mind and no external, independent of us, world, then what you say may be easier to accommodate.

I think we basically reach a point in which we cannot discover the "ultimate aims" of nature, that is a final explanation or cause. We can go so far as we can posited a good relational theory. Likely related to the way we think as a species.

Man, this "hard problem" really captures the imagination of folks. But we can put aside other hard problems, which, we never had an answer for.

So the hard problem of motion, which was made explicit with the discovery of gravity, we've never understood but have accepted, otherwise, physics would've stayed stuck.

Yeah, the brain - matter - so constituted gives occasion for the emergence and formation of experience. Given how non-substantial matter is, it should be less puzzling that thoughts can arise in the brains of certain creatures.

We start with experience, the bigger mystery is not "subjectivity", that's given, but the world.

:ok:

I can see that my projections are pretty smart and often clash with each other.

:cool:

I'm very sorry to hear about these issues you are having with your sister. Mental disorders are extremely complicated to deal with, and absent some good professional care, it's hard to say much that will be of help.

Assuming her condition is one which ebbs and flows, that is rises to manic proportions and comes back down again, you could try to talk to her when she's in a relatively reasonable frame of mind, try to tell her that she needs professional help and possibly medication. In these moments you might want to point out that there is no reason why anyone would want to harm her, to the contrary you love her and want to help. The crucial part here is finding the right time.

Having said all this, I think you are aware that she is not your responsibility, which is not to say that you shouldn't care, not at all, but only that a person who is in such a state can only be helped to the degree that they want help. If they refuse it at all costs, then you cannot physically force her to go anywhere. I know it's easy and understandable to feel guilty, that means you are an empathetic person, but try not to let that escalate into guilt.

Good luck.

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.