Yes. I mean, biology alone and I mean a specific subfield of it, would take a lifetime. Similar to many disciplines by now. So if we do want to speculate reasonably well, we must attempt to find sources which we think are reliable.

And risk ridicule. Or one can take philosophy as a matter of specializing in X or Y's thought on issues. Notice that today, there are very few figures (if any) which are considered giants in the field. Maybe people like Quine, Strawson and Kripke could be considered important.

But I don't think they had the breadth of the classical pragmatists, who lived only a few decades before these.

It's a bit depressing.

I wasn't speaking about science when I gave my example about WWII, so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying in this part. It wasn't a scientific fact, but a historical one.

Faith is faith because it is based on belief alone, with little to no attention to facts. Science and religion in this sense are not compatible when describing the same situations. Sure, science is not sure proof, but nothing is. It's just that science is the best tool we have for ascertaining facts about the world.

Absent good evidence, we need good reasons to belief so and so. Philosophy can help us here. But if you want to speak about facts and how they relate to religion, I don't think one will get very far.

A fact is (often, not always) a proposition in which what is stated adheres to the situation the statement is aimed at elucidating.

Thus, that World War II ended in 1945 is a statement that corresponds to what actually happened in that period of time.

But it can soon become quite complex, as when new evidence renders the proposition obsolete. Maybe a new fact comes about in which we'd have to conclude that the WWII ended in 1946 because of some technicality concerning some document arises.

I see.

Ethically, I think I'd be inclined today (for it could change in the future) to a kind of gentle or sympathetic absurdism. That is, treat people reasonably well, given absurdity. Beyond that, I hesitate to attach myself to a school of ethics, I find the stipulations or teachings or conclusions to be too hard to attain. Perhaps it is an excuse for not being the best me that I can be. But I find comfort in absurdity, which is a good step.

That being said, I've found infinite wisdom in Chomsky and Schopenhauer. More so from the former, but the latter has been fantastic too.

I suppose that what concerns me are those questions that plague the philosophers specifically since its inception in "the West". What is the nature of the world? What is knowledge? Why existence? Why do things make sense sometime and yet often they don't? And so forth.

I find stoicism healthy. Better with a dash of humor, or several dashes. But when the focus in philosophy is one within ethics vs. metaphysics/epistemology, I fear that we may be speaking slightly different languages. Aside some specific questions or situations, ethics doesn't stimulate me to much discussion. Problems related to the nature of the world and mind do.

So, what to do? I hear crickets, and the echoes of eternity.

It seems to me that our temporality is what guides philosophical endeavors. In a limited time, we have to make sense out of this "booming buzzing confusion" before we return to dust. Given this background urgency we seek to ameliorate very big concerns with people who've thought about said issues considerably.

Nevertheless I think what you ask is impossible without stipulating the often unique situations that make us attracted to one person over another. Therefore what I say about person X or Y being the correct person to listen to is unique to me. As Z or A is unique to you.

There are many schools of thought, each of them accentuating one aspect of the world as opposed to another aspect. I suppose that in my case, I've found it liberating to find that there is no such esoteric knowledge which is beyond the reach of a critical kind of common sense.

I suppose that one general generalization (yep I phrase it like this) is that one should not write more clearly than one thinks about an issue. One should ask those whom you are attracted to.

Hard question, but good one.

That would be the idea. And maybe nature works this way.

Or maybe nature is too sophisticated for us as you say, which would make us agree on the main point if differing in our specific formulations.

Hmm. It's a subtle distinction you're making, I think. I mostly have in mind the first option, that of another creature having a more complex or maybe even comprehensive understanding of some aspects of reality such that we'd have no issues.

However, a part of it is quasi-Kantian, in the sense of dealing with X without knowing what X encompasses in its totality. Perhaps the things-in-themselves/phenomenon distinction would be formulated differently: instead of saying we know nothing about things-in-themselves, I'd say we know extremely little about it.

Another creature would perhaps know a bit more.

But I'm attracted to the idea that there is a grounding of the effects in nature that are non-representational in nature, which we can't access. A bit like trying to understand how the brain works by thinking about it.

So I entirely concede that I may be masquerading here, at least in part.

Descartes already complained about it back in his time, that no one would be able to finish reading all the books being published. If you strained yourself or were gifted, you could read most important work in science (including psychology, sociology, medicine), etc. This probably stopped being true by the mid 19th century.

Perhaps Russell was that last person able to master most topics and try to form a synthesis. I think Chomsky, may be the last one, though even he isn't as gifted as Russell was in terms of mathematics, not in terms of anything else.

In any case, yeah. The best one can do is to find a field or two you love or something like that. I like to read experts on specific fields, saving myself the work of several lifetimes by reading, say, 20-30 books as opposed to thousands. Whatever works for you.

And much knowledge is innate, in ways we cannot comprehend. This is a crucial aspect in knowledge, not emphasized nearly enough.

Well math is the application of numbers to some kind of structure. What this structure is, isn't clear.

But I don't understand the notion that there is only structure. It seems to me that a structure must be structure of something.

So if the universe is essentially mathematical and we don't really know what the structure math describes is, then I don't see Tegmark's hypothesis making much sense.

Yeah, yeah. The universe has no obligation to make sense to us. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to give it some sense, otherwise, why bother learning about it? It's a strange proposition on the whole, not very convincing.

Jung may know God like I know about the numinous. The phrase is fine and in ordinary conversation is not terribly complicated to speak like this. After all, we have to speak with each other in this world. But when you begin questioning what does knowing God consist of, complications arise very quickly.

It's a bit different when you say I know my favorite colour or my favorite song. That's ok. It involves in essence recognizing that such a phenomena or qualia are the ones you are most attracted to. What does this amount to? I'm not sure.

I agree, our grasp on reality is tenuous and constantly subject to revision of one kind or another. We are blessed that we are able to have theories at all. There's no obvious reason why any creature should have the capacity for explicit knowledge, much less theories about the world.

Clearing up the issue may help formulate the question. :wink:

I don't find a tension in these ideas. But I do have a "metaphysical itch", so that may be why. I could imagine a different intelligent species from us being able to cognize the world in a deeper manner, perhaps perceiving more than we could, in some respects. So I don't see a problem with this idea in principle

Descartes and his contemporaries knew what they were looking for, in that they sought a mechanical explanation for things. It just happens that the world doesn't work like this.

Depends on the person, no?

I mean, some people really are too far gone to reach common ground. But many are not. If one takes a path of sympathy to these views (maybe empathy would be too hard to reach), then there are ways to tone down the craziness.

Best is to talk to those people who are on the fence on many issues than those already set in stone in terms of belief.

In my experience anyway.

Yes. And it many ways, it's counterintuitive. The most familiar things to us, say an ordinary tree or a slug or a flower are immediate percepts. Yet our knowledge of them - what we can say about them in depth - is very, very little.

Yet when we go "down" to the uber-microscopic level, we have all these fancy theories, which are very hard and only a few people can comprehend them.

It would be interesting to be able to have knowledge of the actual thing or phenomena that produces these effects in us, that is, what grounds the effects that we perceive as laws of nature or even ordinary perception.

There was a time in which this was the aim of science, roughly Descartes' time up until Newton. The Universe was comprehended as a universal machine - like a giant clock - if you can build it, you can understand it. It appears to be our innate way of understanding our given common sense world.

But Newton, to his own astonishment and disappointment, proved the world does not work mechanically.

Thus science was forced to reduce it aims: from understanding the world to understanding theories of the world. That type of knowledge Descartes and others wanted, would be nice to be able to access. But is beyond our comprehension. Chomsky and E.A. Burtt speak about this in interesting ways.

It's hard to answer that question without getting into semantics of what it means to "know" or to "have knowledge". I'll bypass all these sometimes sophisticated and often cumbersome arguments to say that whatever knowledge is, is gradational.

That is, we know some things "more" or "less", depending on our information on the subject matter, our position in life, our experiences and all these other factors that are extremely difficult to enumerate, because there are so many.

Having said this, I think there is good historical evidence and indeed some simple questions one can ask to find out how much we know. I'll keep coming to physics, not because it is the most important subject - I don't think there is such a thing, - but because our knowledge of it is the best tested knowledge we have. All other knowledge we have in other areas of life pale in comparison to the quality of evidence we have in physics.

So ask a simple question: "what is gravity?", "what is a particle?", "what is magnetism?". The answers given are only the effects we can perceive of the phenomena. As to what these things are, we don't know.

Now go up in complexity to chemistry, biology all the way up to psychology. We multiply particles by billions. Minds enter the fray as do complex emotions. This complexity, if you stop and think about it, is truly mind-boggling. As the saying goes, if our knowledge is limited - as it is - our ignorance is infinite.

The anti-science stuff is used as a weapon since anybody can say that a study is biased or ideological or whatever. And it's not difficult to find a graph that shows whatever correlation you like.

I think it sometimes can be unhelpful to speak of science in so generalized a term in connection to political affairs. It's probably better to refer to the subset of scientists engaged in the relevant domain of concern.

The reality of the survival of science will depend upon whether we manage to be around in the next 100 years, or if we will all blow it up. But I don't think these cynics or critics will do much, it's not particularly new after all.

Not quite, though there are similarities. Sadism implies liking to actively harm people. Schadenfreude doesn't necessarily carry a connotation of enjoying other people's pain, more like enjoying whatever misfortunes happens to them. Pain could be involved, but not obligatorily.

There are certain feelings which aren't captured as neatly as one would in other languages. For example, in Spanish we sometimes say "Hasta siempre", which roughly means, until forever. It is usually said when a person dies or is about to, conveying the emotion that we will never see them again. I suppose "farewell" could be similar-ish given a certain context.

Likewise, in English the word "Schadenfreude" is borrowed from German, which is taking pleasure at someone else's misfortunes. Apparently, there is "epicaricacy" in English, which means something similar. But it sounds less nice.

Also, the term often used in English in philosophy "what it's like" to be so and so, is not sufficiently well translatable to other languages. You can get the main idea, but there is an important residue (or nuance) which can't really be conveyed.

I imagine that if China, Japan and so on, the cases sky rocket. Nevertheless, the main ideas can be expressed in any language.

And surely many emotions and perceptions can't be stated appropriately in words at all.

In the end, for our practical purposes, it should make no difference. If true, then we still need to apply laws to deter bad behavior all the while striving to make laws as humane as possible.

If false, then the same consideration applies.

It's fine if many determinists think that criminals or people who commit crimes (of small offence) should be thus treated less harshly. But this option should be the one we have in mind we thinking about reforming criminal justice the world over.

A person thinks. Not a brain.

I've never seen a brain think, or reflect or cognize. But people, on the other hand, do all these things.

So thinking takes place in a person's brain, not a brain itself.

Senses and intellect. It's a synthesis of the two.

Granted, we would not get far with intellect alone. But without intellect, the senses would be quite useless if understanding the world is what you're looking for.

If you can elaborate a bit more on your OP then there'd be more to say on this.

"At the very limit of his life, when familiar, differentiated daylight had become the edge of undifferentiated eternity, where words were only the spindrift off breaking silence, he had glimpsed the strange truth that, 'to one who sees the world aright' all lives that are not terrible are wonderful. In the beginning was astonishment. And so it was with a cry of astonishment, of wonder, perhaps even of joy, that he passed over into silence." -- Raymond Tallis

I don't think that's true. There seems to me as much consensus about things in politics as there is about anything -- it's just deliberately been targeted for confusion and propaganda. But when the buzz words are removed -- "socialism," "communism," "capitalism," "free markets," "liberal," etc. -- it's a much different picture.

A major caveat: this isn't always true. Some people are simply too far gone to even bother with. — Xtrix

But it's extremely difficult to begin a conversation without these buzzwords coming up very quickly. People want to save the mental effort of trying to figure out every single major political issue one may have. So if someone will ask "are you a libertarian/liberal/socialist?", many topics are stalled.

If you can avoid these labels to a latter point in the conversation, it's better I think. First explore the ideas as much as possible before a label comes up, then you can use them. But starting with definitions is problematic.

As soon as you say, I'm for "freedom/democracy/human rights/etc.", people assume "democracy" means choosing candidate A over candidate B (and sometimes a C), "freedom" means (in the US context, much of the time) not having the government interfere with my life.

But if you say "by freedom, I mean freedom to be able to do things instead of starving", people frequently don't understand what you're saying or retort to saying "that's not freedom".

So, it's not about not defining labels per se, but not beginning your axiomatic system with definitions. It becomes contentious too soon. In my opinion.

And yes, I agree, some people are not worth engaging.

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.