That's fine in that you don't find what Russell says interesting or deep. I was only speaking about prose style.

On the other hand, to your credit, you tend to express yourself quite clearly, not in the convoluted way Husserl did. You can say that that's because he was ahead of his time. Maybe.

But then there are people, like Zahavi, who do explain Husserl very clearly.

I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to mean, other that that you understand someone’s prose. — Joshs

You don't think there's a qualitative difference in writing quality between Husserl and Russell?

I'm not speaking about depth of ideas, that's person dependent, but I'd be surprised if you said that Husserl wrote better than Russell or Heidegger than Plato. Nothing against either Husserl or Heidegger, in fact I enjoy them, but not because of style.

Yes. If you do your best to explain and the person does not understand, then the onus tends to be on the person who doesn't get it. I agree with you.

There are, however, personal factors: what you find interesting another person will not or may find it trivial or boring or pointless. That's the way it is with people.

But at the very least, I agree with him that if you can't explain the basic idea or general thought behind something, I'm going to be suspect of your (not you specifically, but anybody) understanding of the topic.

This likely does not apply to mathematics.

:lol:

I mean, it's four words, not entire sentences.

No worries man, it happens to all of us, particularly if we're emotional on a topic, which happens a lot in politics.

No I mean, read the four words prior to where you quoted.

I agree with you. It's a shame they aren't better organized and coherent. They are important for the world.

You're not butting in.

That is emphatically not what I said.

But that's not a consequence of the function of the EU but a result of the gross underestimation of the risks of a viral pandemic, which underestimation we've seen in almost every country that hadn't dealt with MERS and SARS. — Benkei

It's true that the world was unprepared. Most of it. Not Taiwan or South Korea. But as soon as Biden came to office, the US did way better than the EU in organizing vaccine rollouts.

Now that's not the case, due, in large part, to the denialism of large swaths of the US population. But there's no reason why Europe could not have organized itself much better to respond to a crisis. It's a fault in the organization of the EU, it need not happen this way.

Why take him so seriously? Greece and the other member states were collectively fucked by the banking industry, which claimed if Greece failed on its bonds it would cascade through Europe. Everybody feared that spectre and the resultant disintegration of the EU. Of course, Greece also got itself in that mess in the first place by window dressing its accounts through the use of off market swaps (courtesy of Goldman Sachs). — Benkei

Why take him seriously? He went to the EU to argue that they couldn't pay back the money they were being lent! They did not listen to him, and said what I quoted to you. What happened then? Brutal austerity. That's not a law of nature. It need not have occurred.

So really, who cares what he thinks? He probably makes some fair criticisms, I have some of my own especially around the introduction of the EUR but let's not pretend — Benkei

One only "cares" about people who seem to make some sense on what they're saying. That's the only extent to which anybody should care about what anyone says. Yes, he's overly critical in my estimation, but if you read about how the EU formed and how they dealt with the crisis based on the observations of an insider to the IMF, it's interesting and tragic.

I'm not saying the EU is ALL bad. Not having to carry passports over borders, being able to move freely and having a common currency is comfortable and good. But again, normal citizens don't have a say about what laws pass in the EU, or at least, very rarely.

Flawed democracies in the EU: — Benkei

Of course. There's no unflawed democracy at all. And the US is FAR from a political paradise. But they tend to treat each member state in a healthier manner than EU countries treat each other.

It depends on how deep you want to go with this.

If you want a good intro to his talking about innate ideas and the like, I'd recommend you see Michel Gondry's documentary about his ideas, called Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?

It has some nice illustrations about how our innate faculties react to very small changes in the environment.

It's available for free here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv66xFD7s7g

His comment is simply that the way we recognize houses is innate in us. Another alien creature could have the concept HOUSE which differed in what properties are essential to it, such as a HOUSE being though if in terms of seeing an interior first, then the front side.

We do the opposite when we think of houses.

As for the Post-Modernist comment, he has in mind people like Derrida, Lacan and the like, which he thinks are gibberish.

He only demands that people explain these ideas the way a physicist or a biologist could explain some aspects of what they work on in simple terms. Here's an article he wrote about postmodernism:

http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

I really enjoyed the Chomsky audio. I've been thinking I should put some effort into his work. — T Clark

That's my specialty actually.

If you want specific recommendations on different topics, I'll be glad to give you some recommendations.

Yes, it has all these separate governing bodies and all these fancy sounding internal organizations. How much influence does the average European have over any of this?

Virtually nothing. Yeah they can send some people to parliament, if they even know about it. It often (not always) boils down to ECB dogma.

As Schäuble told Varoufakis when Syrizia won: ‘Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy."

Member states cannot decide how much money they should print given the specific economic situations they find themselves in - outside of a select number of countries.

Parliaments are nice, and I like that they can form coalitions to pass laws. Did the EU function well in the 2009 crisis? What about the pandemic, did the member states help each other out?

It was Cuba and China, not Germany or France, who helped Italy.

In short, the EU has a long way to go to become democratic.

Again, Mody and Varoufakis describe this very well.

But I do agree that information on how the EU works, should be made easier to gather.

It's person dependent. Some people have an innate capacity to understand certain ideas better than others, perhaps the topic at hand resonates with a specific individual.

Having said that, on the "negative side", I do think that some of classical figures are very obscure. I very much think Kant was extremely profound, but the dense verbiage used and the fact that he (often) did not refer to ordinary objects to elucidate a conceptual difficulty, makes it harder.

Then there are cases in which I have to strongly suspect that, despite finding a few ideas of some interest, the verbiage is intentionally dense for appearance of profundity.

I think the prime example here is Hegel. Even secondary literature on Hegel is just overwhelmingly complex and dese. And once I unpack the ideas, to the extent that I can, I don't see much that excuses his vocabulary.

On the "positive side", there are plenty of philosophers who wrote clearly and said interesting things. Plato, Descartes, Hume, Reid, Schopenhauer, James the popular side of Russell and so on.

Even when they are clear, which some of them are very clear, the ideas are complicated, because speaking about say, mental phenomena is extremely complex and multifaceted and nuanced. So that may be an important reason as why philosophers are "hard". The topic is very hard in a special sense.

Yes, it is true that lack of effort can be correctly pointed out. But if in good faith I try to read Hegel or Deleuze and get little for my efforts, then the accusation isn't pertinent: it's not worth more time.

Finally, even if Descartes and Schopenhauer are quite clear, if they don't resonate with you, then they don't resonate with you. No problem, there's plenty of other stuff that will catch your attention in philosophy.

Yeah. It should be amended significantly every X amount of time. They had no idea about what we would be dealing with back in the day. Nor the moral progress we've made in many areas.

Maybe. The constitution should be updated though. It's not as if it were God's word or something.

But, point taken.

:lol:

Oh man, getting a wake up call for that message might turn me into murder mode for several minutes.

But yeah, I'd agree.

Yeah. Fox.

I think there should be a law that says that opinion or preference can't be given as fact.

Ahh, I see. There's plenty of good arguments for such a view, Schopenhauer comes to mind. Spinoza too and Parmenides. Also the Upanishads, etc. etc.

It's quite respectable actually.

I try to be mindful of other people's belief. Though if they just give standard Christian dogma, I suspect, more often than not, they haven't thought about the topic much.

Nevermind the fascist point. I had something else in mind.

But the again EU is anti-democratic, and they also want and army... — Wheatley

Yeah. It's ironic.

Not that NATO is much better. I mean yes, the US is somewhat democratic, more than the EU now, I'd argue, but it doesn't matter, I mean they can just bombard you with propaganda and people go wild and want to go to war.

Insane.

I'm lucky, in that I don't think death is the end, with nothing thereafter. — James Riley

You believe in an afterlife of sorts?

The idea that Trump is not hawkish is, if true, limited to foreign states. I have no doubt he would not heistate to turn his brown-shirts loose on Americans if they threatened his ratings with his sheep. — James Riley

Not for no lack of trying. He wanted to provoke a war with Iran by assassinating Soleimani. Iran did not take the bait, despite having ships near there territorial waters.

Not to mention this insane turn in policy with Taiwan, which, if continues as is, might well destroy us all. And I'm not exaggerating.

Yes. Varoufakis and Mody document this quite well.

I agree, they should unite in a kind of "United States of Europe", but the current system they have is crazy. They impose austerity on each other and central bank don't give a damn about anything but inflation.

After two World Wars, one would think they've learned fighting each other is no good.

Yes, that's what they do talk. In that same article you provide it says:

"Currently, there is no such army, and defence is a matter for the member states." and "NATO has been described as the "biggest obstacle" to a European army."

I don't what you are talking about with the fascist question.

Well, let's wait to cross that bridge.

Having said that, there's little reason to suspect the EU will do much of anything. What could they do? Sanction the US or get out of NATO? They rely on NATO for defense.

If they had balls, they'd try to improve relations with other big powers, instead of following Washington in many aspects of FP. There are exceptions true, but the EU needs a dose of actual democracy.

The EU itself, as it currently exists, is extremely anti-democratic, relying on fanatical market bureaucrats. Maybe Trump winning again they'd talk about doing something, and then they'd do nothing.

Many thanks for sharing that, someone here will identify with what you're saying.

I have my share of disorders too, though not as bad.

It's nice to hear that some of this speculation is genuinely interesting, as it should be. I think Plato onwards would have been pleased that this can be helpful.

And if they use a gun, we will blame the gun. — James Riley

Very true.

In fact, a lot of the philosophy I took time to read only made my depression and anxiety worse (Schopenhauer). — Albero

Interesting.

I've always found Schopenhauer's philosophy to be therapeutic. Even being depressed I felt in good company, and when still feeling shitty, but less intensely so, then I would smile at his descriptions and think to myself, yeah it's bad, but not that bad.

Mainländer, on the other hand, should never be read when feeling anything but fine-to-good, otherwise it's very brutal.

It can be, if they are grasped by the arguments and problems.

But it can be very dangerous too, if such a person is feeling depressed, then bumping into the thought of Camus, Schopenhauer, Mainländer or Cioran, among others, might well be the push the sends them off the cliff.

So it's a gamble. But with these types of problems, most things are too. With psychology or psychiatry, if you get stuck with a wrong professional, it can really fuck you up. It's still a work in progress...

it seems obvious that it must exist — TiredThinker

Because it is.

Just one note, there are no final proofs in nature. We can't prove almost anything. We constantly revise what we know and we can't do much more than this.

It all seems to boil down to minimizing annoyances and grievances that will definitely arise whether more on the lonely camp or the social camp.

I don't know about the one per se, but your OP reminded me of Schopenhauer's porcupines:

"One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another..."

What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to our vision. — Srap Tasmaner

That's a good direction to go in. We'd want objects to be coherent, as we take them to be in manifest reality.

The point here would be that we would have the opportunity to catalog new unfamiliar scents by their relations to ones we already know, and we could describe scents we have smelled to others who haven't relying on systematic similarities and differences. — Srap Tasmaner

Then when we bump into a new-ish smell, we would not be surprised by it, because we have a catalogue of similarly smelling things. We might except to predict such smell from sight or touch.

I'm not concerned with whether the underlying psychology here is accurate; what I want is a sort of model of how we think about familiar and unfamiliar sense impressions, how we talk about them with other people, how we might link such behaviors to our actual sensory experiences. Something like what I've described seems good enough for a start. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. This is a thought experiment which can provide a heuristic of sorts to get people into sharpening the ideas they may have of particular sensations. If this can inform a science in any way, good. If not, well we've attempted to highlight sense impressions more clearly.

And now we can flesh out what it would mean for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to vision: the idea is that they would occupy similar positions in our respective sensory catalogs, near the same sorts of things and distant from the same sorts of things, showing the same pattern of similarities and differences, and describable using the same comparisons — Srap Tasmaner

Correct. That would be our "folk psychological" picture.

Is this at all close, you think? — Srap Tasmaner

I like your intuition and the way you caught on to the gist of my problem.

What you point out is true, it would be impossible to catalogue every sensation. Yet these very different senses appear to give us a coherent whole. It's very strange, but taken as a given.

And there's the whole problem of your "red" being my "green", but with smells and sounds. I don't know if when you smell cut grass or when you hear a drum you get the same sensations I do.

I suspect that we do share similar sensory qualities, but each person accentuates one property over another one.

It's also interesting to see what senses are relevant for our scientific theories. I think Russell was correct when he points out that vision is our most acute sensation. Then we go to tactile sensations. Then probably sounds. Our sense of smell is quite poor compared to many other mammals.

Yet while sight gives us good evidence for scientific phenomenon, we paradoxically don't have a science for qualitative colours. Which is strange considering how acquainted we are with colours in our day to day life.

This is meant to be open ended, and your approach looks useful to me. So quite good in my eyes.

Thanks for the reminder.

:cry:

*positive thinking*

I used to think that. And I agree the prospects do not look that great. But the future is unknown, and the more positive the general attitude is towards dealing with an existential threat is, the better the outcome will be. And better remains better even if the outcome might be bad from our present standpoint. If everyone just gave up and said "we're fucked", then we would be truly fucked. — Janus

:lol:

Is a distressed laughter, not mocking.

Clearly, there's no real alternative. The future is unknown and we can only hope that efforts will make the world better. In fact, there are people working on this from many perspectives, decent people, but I don't think they understand the consequences fully. But it's probably best that they don't, cause that could lead to inaction or paralysis.

Your analysis is accurate. You are preaching to the choir in my case, or close to it.

The work is far from easy and change won't come without struggle. The concern for me is mostly one of timeframe, not any of the other aspects which you correctly point out. This wouldn't be such a mental mess if we have, say, 30-40 years to build things slowly. We don't have that luxury anymore, the relevant companies involved hid it under the rug, as you know.

Not attempting to be defeatist, but one must at least be somewhat strategic here. It's fine to argue with people if one wants that, it's good to listen to other ideas even if you despise them. But changing minds on polar opposite people is less effective than getting those who are already on the fence on these issues.

After one manages to get most of the people on the fence to see and act on the problem, can we focus efforts on trying to get others to see what the issues are, assuming we ourselves don't get some things wrong, which we will inevitably do in cases as complex as these. But the large picture is clear enough, either change this system suitably, or our future will be hell on Earth, almost literally.

Yes, the silver lining must be there, otherwise it would be a waste of time.

I don't know if this is pessimism or simple objectivity, but the scary thing is that even if we continue (or begin) to act on these things, odds do not look good at all. Granted, we'll have a shot only if we try. But prospects are not good.

Still, one must grab onto what one can or slip into insanity or something.

Sorry if this comes a bit off left field, but related to the title of your thread, one problem with Climate Denialism or whatever one wants to call it, is that the conclusions reached are so dire and overwhelming, that it's just easier to shut off one's brain.

I mean, saying that we won't really have land to live in and that many of us will die miserably and that most intelligent life on Earth will perish, is some Biblical level shit. Doesn't mean it won't happen, but that from looking outside one's window know and seeing say a nice sunny day to looking at the same window in some short timespan and seeing dead birds on the floor and not being able to go out is just a massive leap.

It also doesn't help that "end of the world" scenarios pop up time and time again. But this time, the reasons are quite legitimate. So there's some cognitive resistance at play too.

It is fascinating. It's as if we have several voices in our head saying contradictory things, often at the same time. We can actually see real life cases with people who have multiple personality disorder. Some people can have more than 6 personalities. Sometimes they don't even know what each other is thinking. But sometimes they do.

As for the general topic, I don't know but, I used to be able to handle obscure prose much better back when I was finishing my studies. But now I go back to Kant and Peirce, for example, and I often don't have much to go on. Conversely, if I read Schopenhauer, James or Russell, I think I can follow what they say quite well. But it's as @jamalrob says, it's a matter of taste.

There's also the problem that we often have ideas which we cannot express adequately into words, to convey the impressions we have. We may hint at it, use examples to try and isolate this X feeling, but we fall short.

Then again, maybe contradicting myself, it's better to say something even if a bit messy, than to say precisely nothing. Within limits.

Yes and I think Galen Strawson offers a good alternative (as good as any other) in his Real Materialism essay.

Everything that concretely exists is physical. This includes consciousness. But that everything is physical should not be confused with the view that everything is physicSal. There's no reason to suppose physics will tell us much about experience, just as physics says very little about music or painting.

Experience arises from brains, we don't know how. We may find out some day, or we may not. As for idealism, we are adopting a choice in terminology: what is incoherent in saying that what I'm most acquainted with my mind and its percepts and that the world is a mental construction on the occasion of sense data with the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena?

Just like gravity is a physical phenomena and sound is too. This does not imply his panpsychism at all. Only monism.

So I see no inherent reason for tension in word use.

There's the common usage of words, in which "will" is taken to mean volition or power to do something on purpose, or some similar association.

If you have in mind a technical word which you will pronounce "will", then it can be whatever you like. Your own definition is fine, but do you connect it with a broader view?

If not, the technical meaning is not helpful.

Now that you mention it, the definition of knowledge might need revision to accommodate this fact. — TheMadFool

I think so in the case of animals. For knowledge to be knowledge proper and not just a very broad word implying ordered information or something, it should be explicit knowledge, as in I know that so and so. Raymond Tallis speaks of this quite well.

It implies you had an expectation, a preconception if you will of how a certain object/phenomenon should look/smell/taste/sound/feel like. — TheMadFool

It's a problem. Again, suppose your senses come back and you see and hear a tree in your garden or park. You might expect that the object is closer that it is, given that much of our information is visual, perhaps more important than tactile sensation.

But when you reach out to try to touch the tree, it doesn't match what you perceive, as sight and sound suggest the object is, say 5 feet away, when it is actually 8 feet.

Something like that.

The thing is, our senses often don't match this way. You can't match music to many things, maybe math. The sensation of warmth isn't really matched by sight.

So it's curious that they sometimes they do happen to match, as when we accustom ourselves to distances coordinating our vision and tactile sensations.

It seems to mean: the smell of grass does not resemble the sight of grass. But why the privileging of sight? After all, it doesn't seem like the reverse operation is admissable - why not say, 'the sight of grass does not resemble the smell of grass?'. — StreetlightX

Yeah, you are right. I'm aware of privileging sight. You could ask the reverse question you are positing. And the answer might be that depending on what you've smelled before, maybe a certain perfume or rolling in mud or whatever, is similar to grass, so when you turn around and see it you are surprised that the smell produced by grass is due to that object, as opposed to mud.

is judged to fail to 'live up to' the 'resemblance' understood as 'what it looks like'. But what kind of problem is this? — StreetlightX

I think the problem is that of arbitrariness. We could imagine we describe to a blind person how a tree looks like: it's taller than me, hard like a table is bright green at the top, etc. I would assume such a person would form some kind of association with "tall", "bright" and so on. So when the time comes that they recover sight, they could say I expected it to be this tall, but not this colour.

Clearly they couldn't compare colour to anything else prior to sight, but they had idea of resemblance of height. So the shock is partial.

Or in yet other words: all sensing is synesthetic from the get-go, and the parcelling out of senses into discrete modalities is an artificial, analytic operation undertaken after the fact, on the basis of a rationalist confusion. — StreetlightX

Sure I agree that objects are synthetic from the get go, in this sense "the given" is already created by us.

But the distinction between primary and secondary qualities was made by Locke and the idea of "bundles" was Hume's, so it was also an empiricist account. Again, I could be asking a confused question, as you point out, it could be that it's like asking why "fish can't climb a tree".

Or it may be a very particular puzzle of mine that may dissolve in a bit of time.

Innate knowledge? The horseness of a neigh - a neigh is part of the (Platonic) form of horses. Someone who hears a neigh a for the first time might immediately recognize it as horse's vocalization. :chin: — TheMadFool

Knowledge can be a problematic word when applied to animals. Innate dispositions might be better. The have a nature such that when an object induces in the animals the relevant sensory organ, they recognize the object as food or predator or mate, etc.

As I tried to point out, the chemical and physical structure of objects determine their properties. Does this answer your question or does it not? if it does then there are reasons why objects appear to us as they do - the way they look, smell, taste, sound and feel are functions of their, how shall I put it?, essence. — TheMadFool

Yeah. So far as we know it's the chemical properties that cause us to smell objects the way we do. At least we have to include chemicals as an important part of the explanation.

I think @Srap Tasmaner was on to an important point, which is the similarity of our reports based on different senses. We often see that sight and touch seem to agree with each other, as when we crumple up a piece of paper and aim for the garbage bin.

But sometimes the reports don't match, a piece of Tupperware may look normal to us and we would expect we could lift up with no problem. Until we touch it and feel an intense burn.

A property-less object? How does one distinguish that from nothing? Is this too off-topic? — TheMadFool

Depends on how you think of objects. Something lacking all sensible properties could be called nothing.