Yet I have also always believed (perhaps naively) that he was sincere. — Xtrix

Yes and no. He was quite a bit more nuanced in private affairs with his fellow Mont Pelerin and Chicago School contemporaries. I know that Phillip Mirowski and perhaps even Janek Wasserman speak about this - not much, but enough to get the idea that he "knew more" than what he said publicly.

So it's hard to judge.

So, a few axioms of discourse — Xtrix

As for the rest of your post, it's a good idea for a thread. I think #2 and #3 make sense, but we have to avoid the temptation of generalizing person X for saying he is a "classical liberal" (as it's used in the US).

We can't help but associate such ideas with free marketism, for example. We can temper our hesitancy if we engage in good faith and sometimes we even learn something.

#3 is probably the best one. We both agree that we want less gun related deaths and less victimless criminals in prison. From these general premises we can work on something. However if we frame it as "gun control" or being "soft on crime", we've already doomed ourselves to a conclusion, most of the time. At least that's been my experience.

#1 is sisyphean. Just look at philosophy for heavens sake, we can't even agree on what consciousness or matter are, simpler notions than politics by far.

This would be a topic in which much could be said if it were possible to measure wisdom. I don't know how that could be possible.

Buddhism has many interpretations as does Christianity. We may speak of dominant trends in one or the other, but if one includes sub-schools and the like, it's practically infinite. So I don't see how to proceed here.

I see it's an old thread, but an interesting question. Yes. Information is physical. This is not meant as a scientistic claim that anything worth talking about seriously will come about by experiments in a controlled environment. It's just that someone has to tell me in a convincing manner, what isn't physical.

I frequently hear the claim "thought isn't physical. Why? Because thought is immaterial." That's not an argument. Putting thoughts aside now, information, however it exists, is a physical phenomena consisting of physical events in the world.

By physical I mean the stuff I'm touching now, which is "mostly empty" and the stuff that's coming out of my head. I don't think someone would say that the table isn't physical nor my head. I think it's a truism, though no less astonishing because of this.

I simply take it that physical stuff is truly baffling.

:up:

Great quotes. Particularly love the reference to Russell, he's correct.

I think Raymond Tallis gave a good answer to this question. Zeno's paradox arises when we mistake mathematical space for manifest reality. In our daily lives, there are no infinite halfway points between things. When we enter into specific intellectual domains, things are different.

But I don't think Zeno's paradox should go beyond the problems it may cause to some of our intuitions about space, i.e. real life affairs.

Been vaccinated and think people should have them in certain settings as mentioned in the poll. The vaccine passports are more complicated.

Yeah, I know, why pretend to care about privacy now, right? Still, I have doubts that we should willingly give out our info to insurance companies or governments, there are good reasons to be warry of them on some occasions.

The mandatory vaccines in certain areas shouldn't be much of a concern, unless you are one of the few people who have real problems with vaccines (allergies, health complications, etc.)

Then there is no reason to suppose anything is going on, from a naturalistic perspective. And common sense too, I'd wager.

But people differ when it comes to common sense.

A while back. I liked it. Then again I think Heidegger is unique in that way, nobody else could continue constructing philosophy like he did. At least those deemed to be his successors weren't as impressive to me.

They only arise if there is brain activity, if there is none, there can't be NDE's. So I think such reports should be taken with heaps of salt.

Honestly. I don't know. I've devoted significant time trying to figure this out. Of course I could be way wrong. The only conclusion I've been able to draw out of this is that metaphysics need be recast under a epistemological framework. Therefore I think we shouldn't speak about the grounds of the world, but instead of how the world appears to us.

Then we need to do some "starmaking". Or something like an analysis of the given.

But again, I'm hardly confident. And no, we should not shut up and calculate, I agree.

I think it is unavoidable to say "white lies" and living in a society in which brutal honesty is expected in every waking moment would be quite taxing.

Of course, there are shades of white lies, from small ones such as saying your day was great today to bigger white lies like saying you can't meet up with a friend because you're in a meeting.

I think life is too difficult to suscribe to a "black and white" system of ethics, so to speak. Having said that little white lies pose no problem that I can see in relation to an ethical system at all.

The so called hard problem, how could "dead and stupid matter" lead to mind. I think that phrasing it this way is misleading. There are many hard problems, not one.

So, to reply now to your comment that "Matter is much stranger than how it appears to common sense" ... If by "stranger" you mean "complicated" and by "appears to common sense" you mean "appears when observing it", I agree! — Alkis Piskas

:up:

Can you please also bring in my quote that you are referring to? Thanks. — Alkis Piskas

"The relationship between the brain and the mind is a significant challenge both philosophically and scientifically. This is because of the difficulty in explaining how mental activities, such as thoughts and emotions, can be implemented by physical structures such as neurons and synapses, or by any other type of physical mechanism. This difficulty was expressed by Gottfried Leibniz in the analogy known as Leibniz's Mill"

Information is a word. If it is a property of the natural world, it seems to me to be nebulous if it is applied to so many different fields of inquiry.

Wheeler's idea of information differs from Tononi's. So it's not clear to me how useful this term is. But, people seem to do a lot of work with it, so I could be quite wrong.

If you're up to a quite challenging, but extremely fun philosophical book, I suggest you try Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer. If you want a lighter read, Ubik by Philip K. Dick is quite fun and leaves you feeling quite disoriented.

What you say is true. We see this "blooming buzzing confusion" in William James' term, as evidenced by an utter bombardment of sense data what with trees, apples, rivers, grass, birds and everything else that happens to be in your field of vision at the moment.

I think this leads to a natural intuition: all this diversity had to come from somewhere and furthermore, they must be related somehow, otherwise how could different things even exist? From this we abstract away things that we think make sense to parse out: the sky is blue like this river, the leaves are green like the grass, the butterfly flies, like a bird.

From these properties, we attempt to establish regularities or patterns that hopefully say something about the world. But, as has been the case in human history, our initial approach to things via intuition frequently misleads us, but serves as a heuristic to further refinement.

Epistemically, I can't disagree. Metaphysically, however, I think we still have all options available. One can't speak of mind realistically if we take away body.

So yes, in terms of knowledge mind is our only avenue to access the world, but mind itself can be interpreted many ways.

I agree. Physics is indeterminate in regards to metaphysics.

But I think the same can be said about the metaphysical status of the brain and even of mind too. All these things can be looked at without any metaphysical commitment.

We've got science which isn't common sense, so we'd made progress.

How far we'll go, who knows?

So could that be an indication that our brain's "matter" also is much more than what we can perceive? — dimosthenis9

It depends on what you mean by "perceive", if by this word you mean our normal human perceptions without that aid of technology, then it's by now an established empirical fact.

If you include technology to perception, I think there are good reasons to suspect that there is more to the universe than what we can reveal about the world. We are human beings, not all-knowing creatures like God or something like that. So there must be a limit in what our senses and intellect tells us about the world.

So at the end is brain the only thing which gets involved in thinking? As NOS4A2 mentioned, at the end can brain "think" without heart, lungs etc?? For me seems kind of strange to separate mind (thinking etc) from all of the rest of the body. — dimosthenis9

It's hard to say. Obviously brains don't think in the sense that if you remove it out of the body, you'd still have these thoughts to examine. Which is why I say that it's people that think, not brains. So I'd agree with you.

It is difficult, it's almost impossible to get behind our ordinary intuitions which have been built-in to our mode of thinking for who knows how long.

Your approach is really different and interesting. — dimosthenis9

Thank you.

Excellent post. :clap:

Well, 13 pages later and still no consensus on what metaphysics is or what it should be.

But then you notice that debates of this kind has been going on for thousands of years.

Oh well...

Matter is much stranger than how it appears to common sense. Common sense tells us to think of matter in terms of solid, indestructible stuff. But this kind of matter is not the matter that exists in the world. In fact, "solid" stuff, is by far, much more rare than non-solid matter.

Our common sense misleads us. We know so little about thoughts and brain, from a scientific perspective, because the topic is incredibly complicated. Just look at physics, the most successful of the sciences. It deals with the simplest things in existence: particles, "waves" in space and other small level phenomena.

A good deal of physics is trying to figure out how a few particles colliding could create certain strange effects. But if you consider a brain, you are speaking of billions of particles and a more complicated science, like biology.

And when you speak of persons, you enter sociology and here there are too many interactions between complex creatures to have much by way of insightful data. That's why I think we know so little about thoughts.

A person is thinking. How the thought is created is quite obscure, it seems we are extremely far from finding an answer to this. The thought isn't realized in my pinky, nor in my stomach, nor in my hair. My brain must be involved somehow and I think it is the best candidate to say that thought takes place in my brain.

But from speaking to brains to speaking about persons, complexity sky rockets. Which isn't helpful as brain already are formidably complex.

I had in mind Wiles when he managed to give proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, he said that one part that wasn't making sense, but then he remembered something that gave him a solution, and he called it "elegant."

The novelist, who was also a capable mathematician, described some of the higher level stuff in math to be "elegant" too. I can't image it, because I lack that capability to be good at math, never mind these very high level equations.

Still, if they say so, I believe them. But it will be an elegance very few people appreciate and like you say, it would be hard to even explain in what this elegance consists of to people who don't know this kind of math.

Yes it can. I see the cow on the field and assume it's a cow as long as I'm sane and sober. — Shawn

You can be sane and sober and mistake a cow for another animal. Sane and sober people can hallucinate too and often do, such as seeing water down the road.

If you want to think about knowledge in terms of justified true belief, you can. But I don't see how it helps.

But knowledge isn't justified true belief, it can't be defined by a strict set of criteria.

A fact is deemed to be a fact, when it is recognized by the relevant people to be so: those involved in the affair, experts in a specific field, etc.

I don't have many problems with it.

I do think the phrase "scientific revolution" or specifically his "paradigm shift" (not mentioned in these quotes) to be way overused.

But aside from that, what he's saying looks fine to me.

I don't necessarily see problem. Very often, when a physicist or a mathematician finds a solution to a problem, they describe it as "elegant". And what seems art to someone, may not look like art to someone else, which is common.

Of course science and art are different human activities, but human activities shouldn't be forced into one descriptive scheme alone. One can say that a cook has that dish "down to a science". Doesn't mean cooking is physics, but the way the cook does the plate is extremely precise and unique.

Also, physics, which is the "deepest science" we have, is described in equations, which very few people understand. To an ordinary person, a physics equation may look like random scribbles on a page. Not so to those who understand it.

From here, I think each person may take whatever views they have about art and science and argue one way or the other. I don't see a necessary conflict - while admitting they are different activities.

I don't see why not. Certain experiments could be said to be an artform, such as using sophisticated devices to see detect the wave function collapse.

It's not as if there is something called "art" which only applies to certain works of arts, or specific artists.

I think it does, but we cannot prove it beyond doubt. This was actually Hume's position, which is sometimes interpreted as him saying that we don't know anything about causal powers. He said constant conjunction is the best we can grasp about causality, but we can't prove this. There may be more to causality that constant conjunction, but we are in ignorance as to what these extra steps involve.

I should add that Sellars can be quite useful here. He can be and often is rather obscure in exposition. But his distinction between manifest image and scientific image is quite accurate.

What to make of this distinction, depends on one's views of course.

Clearly.

I think this particular thread is doing fine. I was thinking that if you did begin another one on consciousness being an illusion, then I'd think one can already anticipate what disputes will arise and I doubt people would modify their positions.

I'm only saying that I think it doesn't make sense anymore to think of mind as separate from matter. So they must belong together.

That's fine. Supernaturalism is hard to even articulate, it seems to me. But there are all kinds of people in the world.

Good luck on that thread. It's going to be a tough semantic battle.

Maybe, it's possible. But I really don't see any reason to believe consciousness is an illusion at all. So although people may debate it, I don't see the point. If someone says it's an illusion, but it seems evident to most other people that it's not, then it's just a question of asserting one thing or the other. I doubt much people will be convinced.

I mean, there are people who think consciousness is a kind of illusion. But there's no evidence for this at all besides appealing to the fact that neuroscience will one day show that red is not red or that it only seems we see qualities but we really don't. But that is irrational.

Saying that the physical is more real than the mental is kind of like saying red apples are more real than yellow apples. Or that water vapor is more real than liquid water. It highlights some set of properties other than some other set of properties.

I think it should be obvious that those physical properties we call mental properties are the one's we are directly acquainted with. But this doesn't oppose physical with mental, as mental properties are, again, configurations of physical stuff. Nor is one more real than the other, unless someone can tell me what "real" means in this case.

And thinking about these questions will likely remain with us for a long time.

Florida Man does some crazy shit. :wink:

Sure. I mean Australia has a relatively rational government. As far as I know, I do remember that global warming denial was somewhat higher in Australia than in other comparative countries, due to industry interests in coal if I don't misremember.

But for the rest, your country has done remarkable well, all things considered.

Na man, I've never thought you were anti-science at all. I think you enjoy it, like anyone interested in philosophy should. Scientism is something I dislike too, it's an excuse for lazy thinking. I would maybe put different emphasis than you in some topics, but nothing massive.

It's a shame that bad ideas form the US get copied in other countries. But I suspect denialism will eventually whimper down, IF this doesn't continue for more than say, a year.

Absolutely. No doubt. It also mirrors a rightward shift in all developed countries since the 1980's, with the rise of neoliberal dogma.

So, as you've mentioned Australia also has pretty astonishing right wingers, not like Q perhaps, but you see it. And Europe has outright fascist parties in most democracies.

Then you see Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Modi and it isn't a pretty picture.

But absolutely. In the US, it's magnified, not helped by the religious extremist strain that runs in large parts of the population. But how it reaches to this level of saying that getting a vaccine infringes on your "freedom", when that very freedom permits you to kill another person, is difficult to believe.

Yeah. But a good deal of Floridians must not care. Maybe half. They've had a string of bat shit crazy mayors. It doesn't get much weirder than Florida so far as the US goes, most of the time anyway.

But the difficult question is precisely this, presenting a hypothetical: what the heck do you do if say, half the people - or maybe even a slight majority - don't want vaccines? Would it not be anti-democratic to make people take vaccines in such a situation?

I know, this isn't what's happening, but it's a tough question, I think. But even in an extreme case like this, people who have no good reasons not to take vaccines are potentially murdering people.