Battle against? You can say that, sure. Some like to distinguish between intrinsic nature and extrinsic nature, though I'm skeptical that we ever get to intrinsic natures. Perhaps we graze the surface of these things, or the structural properties of phenomena.

Yes, those questions of what if a good life and what should I do and all that is part of the tradition going back thousands of years. These questions don't have easy answers, or we wouldn't be asking them still.

It's also mental masturbation, which I don't object to, nor do I think you do either.

I can understand it being everything to some, meaningless verbal quibbles to others. But I don't know about the wise.

As far as I'm concerned, go on as long as you wish. I don't see any problems with it. Though I'm unclear at what you're getting at.

I agree with you that we should keep in mind the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, while keeping in mind that these very distinctions aren't always clear cut. At least not as neatly as we would initially suppose.

But I don't personally agree with the idea that by using language we are committing ourselves to anything. Unless you assume that words stand in for things in the world, which I don't think is the case most of the time. Sometimes we do posit an object in the world, say, a tree, and I can point to the tree I have in mind. Most of the time, we don't posit an object for our language use.

If we drop ontological commitment, we can speak of these fictional entities with a bit less difficulty.

However, we soon enter into very obscure territory, it seems to me. When we speak of Pegasus or Santa Claus, we have in mind an idea, not an object. So ideas and how they relate to the world is crucial here.

Yet, even if Pegasus and Santa Claus don't exist ontologically, we can go to a shopping mall during Christmas and say "that person" is Santa Claus. Well, not exactly. Likewise, we can point to a statue of Pegasus and say "that is Pegasus", but again, not really. These are representations, in the everyday use of the word, of our fictitious ideas.

It is a complicated topic.

Schopenhauer praised Vedanta and particularly the Upanishads to no end. Aside from him, not many of the classical figures in philosophy interacted with Eastern philosophy.

Unless monistic idealism is true. Then body is actually just an image of mind. And your last comment conjured a pretty disturbing image in my mind that made me laugh :lol:. But you’re not wrong. — Paul Michael

Yes. I mean, I believe that some form of monism is ultimately true, that is, everything is made up of fundamentally the same stuff. I don't think the universe cares for metaphysical dualisms. It seems nature prefers simplicity, meaning that there has to be something that accounts for everything in terms of constitution.

So far, we cannot account for 95% of the mass-energy in the universe, hence label it "dark". But I suspect that in some respects, it will have to share some simple property with "ordinary matter".

Then body is actually just an image of mind. — Paul Michael

I agree that it is.

But then my body is not fundamentally different from mind, if it is the same stuff in some sense. If my body is fundamentally different from my mind, I could not see how my mind could represent itself in a body. So some similarity must be assumed.

other species possess some level of consciousness and that their consciousness might also be considered to be one of the alternative contexts of consciousness that could replace or be replaced by another... there very well could be conscious (though not necessarily intelligent) life on other planets in the universe. — Paul Michael

It doesn't solve the problem of how consciousness first arose, unless you accept some form of panpsychism. Which is fine. I don't personally see good evidence for panpsychism, but it's not something I can outright reject. It's unfalsifiable, though it does solve the problem of emergence in a certain way.

If you say something like, human beings can be said to represent one large mind or brain, I think there are ways to formulate that into something coherent.

the ‘self-void’ left by the dead conscious being would be ‘filled’ by one of the other existing selves or one of the new selves. Now, I have no proof or evidence that this actually happens, but it’s an interesting possibility to entertain, at least to me. — Paul Michael

It could. And I have nothing against entertaining these ideas, to be clear.

From my perspective, this creates more questions than it solves. It forces mind to be something separate from the body, but there's no evidence that mind can exist without an accompanying body.

So to be consistent, you'd also have to entertain the view that (say) your arm is created in part, by the arms of a dead person. I can't make sense of that.

But if one person’s consciousness ceases to exist while others’ continue to exist and new consciousnesses come into existence, could it be the case that the consciousness that disappeared is in a sense ‘replaced’ by one of the others? — Paul Michael

I don't see how that follows. Take the number of people who've been born in the 20th century alone, we're beyond 7 billion people now.

For the "replacement" to work in any coherent sense, you'd want to say something like, for every person that dies another person "takes in" or is influenced by the consciousness of the dead person. But population growth has gone up globally, this would require a single experience to subdivide into many people.

How would a newly born person "make up" for the experience they did not receive from the dead person? They'd need to get it from there own internal resources meaning genetics, brain activity and whatever else plays a role in consciousness.

So I think you can eliminate the whole thought experiment and assume that our individual experience does not affect other individual experiences without direct interaction of some kind.

And perhaps my use of the term ‘naturalism’ here was ill-informed. — Paul Michael

Few of the terms in philosophy are well defined. So there's no problem with your formulation. I was using my own too. :)

If I understood correctly, it follows that other people with experience would remain. But not that anyone dying would be the cause of another experience coming into being.

There's no reason to suspect that such a thing happens.

I don't think naturalism says much about experience or lack of experience. We can only point out what looks like consciousness to us, as is found in other people, and some animals. But what happens after death or why we even have experience at all, likely does not fall under the purview of naturalism.

As I understand the term "naturalism", it's useable for publicly observable phenomenon (things everyone can see).

But for private phenomena, it's of less use.

I mean perhaps reading all those books you mention could help. They likely wouldn't hurt.

As for me, it looks to me as if the "answer" to the issue is straightforward, in a sense. Life is very complicated. If it were easy, then all we would need is to find that one book that gives you the solution to this problem. Thousands of years later, there is no clear answer.

If an issue persists for this long, it implies that there are too many variables. We can speak of good tendencies or habits in quite general terms. But beyond that, every person is an entire world to themselves.

Echoes - Pink Floyd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBca3xf-j3o

Overhead the albatross
Hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb toward the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?

And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday
You fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky

Well, that's true. On the other hand, it is a legitimate question to ask, does physics touch the noumena? In other words, does physics tell us about the world "in itself"? Perhaps. Our knowledge of physics has advanced drastically since Kant.

But Russell, who knew physics and mathematics very well, stated that physics tells us about the structural properties of the world, leaving the intrinsic nature of atoms (and quarks, fields, etc.) unknown.

But, point taken.

Well put.

It's extraordinary that we imbue the "external world" with so many things. Properties, qualities, substances, richness, depth and on and on and on. It's devilishly difficult to think away what remains of objects once you take away what you put in them.

I'm not speaking of "atoms or fields remain", I'm thinking of an ordinary sized object, such as a statue or a tree.

It is a total mystery to me. And that's "only" the external world. The "world" inside is a whole other issue. What with the infinite amount of ideas a person can have, many of which share virtually nothing of what can be called effects from the objects outside us.

I've always though Russell had it right in his In Praise of Idleness.

You can take a job doing what you love to do, but the demands of the job will make you hate it—or you will pervert what you love in order that it conform to your job. — Leghorn

I find this to be extremely accurate to my experience. I think it's kind of a psychological quirk that's inside of many people, not all. It's very curious.

:up:

That's a pretty good sketch.

Here's a short article just about targeted ads: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/05/targeted-ads-fake-news-clickbait-surveillance-capitalism-data-mining-democracy — Benkei

It's pretty bad. It's even hard to find words to say if one considers the very real consequences of this phenomenon. Making everything reducible to terms of profit is going to kill us all.

What a way to go.

:up:

Absolutely.

In a trivial sense, philosophy is the mother of the sciences. Which is true, out of philosophy came physics, biology, chemistry and everything else. Needless to say Leibniz knew physics quite well for his day, Schopenhauer wasn't horrible in biology and Priestley, who discovered oxygen, contributed a lot to metaphysics, though his work is criminally neglected.

Those are just the names that I came up with now, I'm sure you can think of many other examples. So in a traceable sense, philosophy is the most successful of all fields of enquiry.

But as "science" got its name from Whewell and was developed by others, philosophy at around the mid-18th century pretty much got left with the very hard questions.

It's a bit of a contingency that the name "philosophy" is now associated with "unanswerable questions", as these questions were very much what interested many of the classical scientists.

But to be fair, philosophers still contribute to linguistics, neuroscience and psychology. So there's still overlap.

It helps me to think of it as a historical subject. We try to understand the world and ourselves. When we arrived at the scene, when the first human beings acquired the capacity to articulate thought, we tried to comprehend what was happening.

At first we told stories. Stories usually related with dietes associated with the creation of the Earth, the rivers, the sea. Gods moved the winds and sacrifices guaranteed good fortunes. Thunder was the anger of the Gods.

At some point, we gathered in large enough numbers to refine our thinking into more precise and accurate accounts of the world, not relying on myths, but on observing the world closely.

By these means, we achieved considerable success in mathematics and parts of astronomy. But many questions pertaining to us and the world remained problematic:

How can we step on the same river twice? How can we reach a target if there are an infinite number of events separating an apple from an arrow? How do we speak of one entity being the same person if they've gone crazy? How can thought arise from matter? And so on.

Fast forward thousands of years and we get science, based on observing the world under the guidance of an explanatory theory. We reduce the entities analyzed and focus on select things to study, putting aside phenomena that interfere with a theory.

We couldn't, after all, fire a canon ball around the Earth's surface. But given certain conditions (removing friction, for instance) we find out that the same force that causes an apple to fall causes the movement of the moons and planets.

But after all this, questions still remain. Important questions and hard ones. What is a self? Do we have free will? Is the world independent of me or a product of our way of ordering the world? What is a good life? How can matter produce thought? What is causation? How many things are there in the world? And so on.

Philosophy, then, is the rational enquiry into very hard question, on topics we have barely been able to make progress in for thousands of years.

The confusion on what philosophy is likely stems from the fact that some of the best philosophers in history, were also scientists. If you asked Hume, are you a scientist or a philosopher he could not say. Same with Descartes and Kant and Leibniz and Locke and many others. To them, there was no distinction.

For the Greeks even less so.

At least that's how I think of the topic.

I am way outmatched here in terms of knowledge of Plato, so forgive my ignorance, I won't be providing quotes nor anything like that. I'll have to re-read some aspects of Plato sometime.

With that important note out of the way, there is something very alluring about Plato's forms. I am not speaking of mathematics here, which I know is extremely important, but more so of ideas. The ideal horse or tree or river and down the line with all the objects we categorize.

In a modern-ish context, it could be said that we are born with certain ideas latent in the mind, which grow as we grow up, both as a biological creature and as persons. The idea would be that if there exist other creatures capable of thought, they would have these objects "in them", only waiting to come to fruition as they develop.

Of course, there's the overwhelming possibility that minded creatures may have a nature that differs from ours and thus would not have exactly the same conceptions we have, but similar. This cannot be proved and resides outside of science - not in principle - but in our limits of understanding we bring to bear when we encounter the world as we are.

It's a beautiful train of thought - on the whole - and could even be useful to develop further with modern day knowledge being used.

Fair enough. :up:

Do cars, houses and trees exist mind-independently? No. But it doesn't follow that they're not real, unless you define the use of the word "real" to mean something mind-independent.

I mean, I'm going to say that this laptop isn't real or that the tree outside my window isn't real? This is crazy talk.

But then if you say is this laptop I see or the tree outside my window mind-independent, I'd say no and we'd agree. Which makes talk of "realism" a matter of semantics and not substantive.

Unless you want to talk about ghosts, then we have to clarify a little. :wink:

Ah, I see definitions vary from "isolated" systems, to all systems. And it is frequently connected with the "arrow of time", as Sean Carroll talks about - and others too.

I fully admit to not understanding it, no jest. But I do think that associating it with "order" or "disorder" is subjective.

Thanks for the clarification. :smile:

I don't know if I'd call this "logic" as is understood technically.

The weather may be cold for me but hot for you. This is a fine book for me but meaningless to you.

On to more weighty topics:

Over 5 million people have died during Covid.

One view, which is accurate, would say that this is quite a high number of people. And more are dying.

On another view, this is actually not that many, compared to other viruses which are much more lethal.

And so on.

Don't hold your breath.

Maybe, but communication would be a big problem.

I suppose the Earth is due for another Carrington Event. The globally disruptive after effects would go on for weeks or months at least, making "2020" look like a kindergarden food fight by comparison. — 180 Proof

Everything is quite sunny, literally.

If it isn't extreme heat, let's get our electrical grid fried. Damn man, yeah life entails suffering and all that, but these are premium level problems, we are here to witness some crazy shit going down. The privilege of being born now. :smirk:



It would be quite problematic actually. Not because of the humor-ish aspect of not being able to go to Facebook or AlJazeera or ABC or YouTube, but because lots of financial data, all kinds of data actually, now belong online almost exclusively. It might well cause a significant market problem, with who knows what else.

So not good.

Objective idealism is a perfectly sound and sane philosophical outlook, even though it is a minority view. — Wayfarer

Is this the same objective idealism of Peirce?

Not to drag this into anything too lengthy, but what would be the basic definition?

I know of "transcendental idealism", a bit of Berkley's idealism and finally Kastrup's idealism. These are rather different, and Peirce never seemed to express his view clearly. I mean no quarrel here, as you know of my strong sympathies with many aspects of what you believe.

Entropy is a good word because you can use it and nobody knows what you talking about. Some famous scientist said this and he was correct.

To be fair, you said "the second law" in the thread. The problem is that the second law applies to closed systems. Is the Earth a closed system? Is the Universe a closed system? This is debated endlessly.

That's about heat specifically, but somehow it applies to everything. No global warming is because we don't want to change the system we have - at least those in power. It's suicidal, but it's what's happening.

"Study nothing, except in the knowledge that you already knew it." - Clive Barker

"What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive... scanner... see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better.

Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too."

- Philip K. Dick

De Música Ligera - Soda Stereo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_FkEw27XJ0

:fire: :fire: :fire:

There's no doubt that patriarchal societies form a large part of our culture, dominant even, and for this reason, we have the world we have, at least in large part. Those aspects of competition, strength, prowess and such are commonly associated with masculinity.

A matriarchal society, as per your example, would solve some of the problems we have, maybe lots of them. Not all though, nor am I claiming you believe this.

I just wonder, in a large scale society, would a matriarchal society be amazing? I have doubts about that. I mean things like rape and violence would very likely be reduced. But it also looks to me as a way out of hard problems: if only women ran the world, the world would be much better in most aspects.

I think feminism has accomplished a lot in the West since 1960's. There's just much more to do.

You are right about fear, but that's the method used to control everybody.

One thing is to say that many people don't understand the political spectrum correctly, so they may call themselves "libertarian" when they in fact may be a conservative, or else someone calls themselves a socialist but in actuality they are "mixed-economy capitalists" and other examples.

But that there is a spectrum is quite clear.

You can take out "the reality" and, if you take out "surely" (certainly), then you can even take out "(for us)". We may turn out (afterwards) to be mistaken (in a waterpark, say), yet the world does not come crashing down--only our desire to be sure beforehand. — Antony Nickles

I can take away "the reality" only in the sense that reality can be honorific, as I've said elsewhere. If someone says "this is a real waterpark", they aren't implying that there are two waterparks: waterparks and real waterparks, it's a matter of emphasis.

I use "surely" as a word implying confidence, not certainty, we could remove it if you prefer. I don't have such high aims. Water looks transparent in small amounts and at night, it's practically black, not blue.

I can't remove "for us" in any meaningful sense. I don't think birds or panthers think about, cognize or speculate about waterparks or anything else. They may even be in one (what we call a "waterpark") and be oblivious to it, outside of finding plenty of chemically treated water, it's not an issue.

As I said, our ordinary criteria allow us to rigorously dig into these topics with specificity, precision, accuracy, distinction, clarity, etc. So there may be something else causing you to overlook philosophy's insights into color (which I mention above), and its ability to add to the discussion of justice. — Antony Nickles

That's fine. I don't have a problem with that. Only that in being philosophy, agreement is not as common as it is in other areas. Which is not bad, just the way philosophy is.

This is how philosophy removes the context of a concept in order to slip in the criteria that something be certain. The thing is that we don’t speak of anything without the specifications and implications of it in our lives, so if we don’t remove them but focus on them, they are what we intellectually can grab onto about something. — Antony Nickles

We could. But at this level of abstraction ("what is reality") as opposed to "what should be counted as real", the vagueness of the issue at hand can cause people to pursue different paths, with little by way of common criteria which could help establish agreement.

But not certainty. I think it's futile to chase this idea much.

given the definition that reality is the totality of all possible experience, and because the accumulation of all experience is impossible, it is clear the experience of reality is a non-starter. — Mww

If you take that definition, then you will end up with your conclusion. I wouldn't put it like that, but I can see the legitimacy of defining it that way.

The first makes explicit an object of experience as part of reality, the second suggests experience is the object of reality. Only one of these can be true. — Mww

If you want to think in terms of subject and object you can, it is often helpful. We can say that we are simultaneously subject and object. We can speak of events instead.

Call it an subjective affectation, a partial object, the disclosure of being. I think experience is part of reality.

It’s fine, no harm-no foul. We just each have quite diverse conceptions of reality, that’s all. — Mww

And that's why I wanted to talk to you, you force me to try to be clear. I don't aim to convince, only to get a better grasp of what I think is true.

So thanks. I do appreciate it.

Not sure what "this" is (gonna assume everything I said, which seems like an oversimplification may be coming), but no, I am talking about everything. Juts not differentiating a "reality" from something we don't quite get at, or only get at rationally, or through "phenomenal properties". — Antony Nickles

"This" meaning your approach, as I understood it. Sure, I mean, if we look at the ocean, the blueness we see and the wetness we feel are surely part of the reality of the ocean (for us). But we can't study the blueness or the wetness. This doesn't mean they aren't important, I'm not saying that. What I am trying to say is that I think it's likely that we cannot study scientifically those aspects of the world which we find most interesting:

Music, colours, politics, most aspect of experience, history and so on.

We have some interesting ideas and categorizations, but not "theoretical depth". But surely these things matter a good deal.

What I am saying is that we do know how to look into ourselves and our world, if only we get past our paralyzing need for certainty (say by falling back to only genetics). — Antony Nickles

I agree. Certainty is not attainable for creatures like us.

The implications we find when we say, for example, "You live in your own reality." are more concrete than all the machinations about what "reality" is. — Antony Nickles

In a sense, yes, because in that phrase, reality is anchored more clearly as belonging to the way a person views and relates to the world. If we speak of "reality" without such specifications, the conversation will be broad as we aren't yet specified by what we agree to take as aspect of reality that are relevant.

Some may include God in reality or be dualists, etc.

Neither could I, it went a bit over my head and felt like a chore to get through. I'll try again some other time. — darthbarracuda

Yes, these authors tend to produce dense works that require persistence and patience, ideally, it ends up being worth the effort. Depending on the person, it can pay off in spades or it could be garbage. People have both loved and hated Pynchon and Wallace. Same with Gass.

Definitely not the type of book you'd pick up casually.

Do you think perhaps you might be using the word “experience” too broadly? — Mww

Yeah, I do use it very broadly, in part because consciousness is over used these days.

For me, the conscious part of the mental is experiential goings-on, at this moment. What goes through me or in me as I write these letters or think about the words I'm using. Or shut my eyes and listen to the fan, and so on.

....is meant to indicate? — Mww

The way I see it, it's not as if when I look out my window, it's "I" or "me" looking at this window. It's more like making sense of a green pattern and later on a complex process these sensations gets labeled as "a tree". Yes, it's always subjective.

If such is the case, and it is as well the case that what you experience is not the object itself that is in reality, then how can your experience be part of it? — Mww

I don't think we need to say that we experience "reality-in-itself" in order to say that we experience part of reality. Any experience whatsoever will be conditioned by subjectivity, so the "things in themselves" will remain an issue.

But my representations are part of reality, which are formed by my innate faculties in conjunction with sense data from the world. They may be a step removed from the realizing grounds of whatever appears, but this doesn't make them any less valid as a part of reality. But this is true of any creature and whatever world they experience. Whatever they experience is part of reality for that creature.

If experience is not part of reality as appears to us, I would have no reason to trust my manifest image for anything.

This looks to me as an attempt to (try to) clarify the phenomenal properties we add to the world. Yes, we grow into certain molds - set forth by nature - we don't know exactly how, aside from saying that genetics play a role.

But I think that novels explore these things you are speaking of quite well.

If as such you mean "in itself", no. Of course not.

Basketballs are the results of a complex interplay of the a-priori, which includes some aspects of concept formation, plus the recognition of sensible qualities with whatever is "out there" that results in me calling that thing "a basketball".

Most of the work is done by me, automatically and in large parts unconsciously. If I were to limit myself to what is "out there", minus the a-priori, I wouldn't know if I could even perceive anything at all, much less a basketball.

So reality would be essentially non-existent. As Cudworth put it "the book of nature is legible only to an intellectual eye". Only those things that arouse something "native and domestic" in us, can we call real.

I don't say much more than this.

what you experience is always contingent on circumstance and you have no promise of knowledge given from it, but that the experience belongs to you alone is undeniable, thus impossible not to know with apodeitic certainty. Doesn’t it then seem that the greatest acquaintance would be that which is inescapable? — Mww

If I follow, the "I think" that accompanies experience, would form a part of experience. And thus be a part of reality (for me).

Yes, I'd agree with your last sentence.

I should say that I use the word experience very broadly.

And the fact that our (non-mathematical) world is not certain freaks us out so much we cut ourselves off from the thing-in-itself (from what essentially interests us) so that we can impose certainty onto the (our) world, even though we can't know (for certain) the "real" world. We kill the world before we even get started knowing each thing by their everyday criteria. — Antony Nickles

Hmm. I think that in our common sense folk science, we think we are studying "thing in themselves", that doesn't lead to theories. It can lead to very valuable stuff like art and the like.

I think the problem arises when we think that in studying say certain properties of trees or brains or anything else, many often assume we are studying a "tree-in-itself" or "the brain-in-itself". That's a mistake. However, we've gained lots of good information about the world this way.

I don't think "things in themselves" can be studied empirically. I think we can try and say negative things about it: what it's not and what it doesn't have, leaving very little room for positive contributions.

So I agree with the spirit of the argument, but I don't think we can study MUCH of "what interests us", in much depth. From phenomenal properties such as colors and sounds to political organizations. We just can't get much depth empirically about these things.

Ahhhh....but we can. We know it as thinking. And we do separate, by delineating that which is sensed, from that which is thought. — Mww

I think this is our main point of disagreement. Not at all that I think experience is an illusion, I'm averse to eliminitavism of most stripes. I think experience is the which we are most acquainted with out of everything. But I don't think it's the main a priori facet, that is inscrutable to us. It's part of a process of which we only become aware of a tiny part of. In other words experience only gives us a small part of what is termed "mental".

Case in point....if reality is conceived as that which contains all real things, reality cannot itself be conceived as a real thing, for then reality must contain itself, an impossibility. If reality is not a thing, but can be represented in thought, hence subsequently talked about, then it is nothing more than a conception, and the conceptions conjoined with it to form propositions about it, must themselves be either hypotheticals or altogether unknowable. — Mww

Ah. Well if you include "things in themselves" as part of the conception of reality here, it gets much more complex. However, for the purposes of this thread, I think it suffices to say something like, reality is whatever there is (for us).

Anything beyond that or whatever grounds this reality, is admitted as mostly unknowable.

Good speaking with you as well, and don’t sell yourself short. Nothing trivial about this stuff. It is what we do, after all. — Mww

Thanks. Na man, it's that if I don't understand this for myself then it's a problem. I avoid complexity as much as I can. But I agree, it is what we do.