That's fine. I'm only accentuating that, strictly speaking, "now" always passes. So if we want to speak sensibly about now, we should probably consider the specious present, which includes the almost immediate future as well as the almost immediate past.

I think that makes the idea of "now", a bit more concrete. But's it's a technicality, which is not wrong, I don't think.

I remember the late great Robert Fisk quoting a US soldier, don't know his rank, who was patriotic and wrote really well.

Chris Hedges has an interesting book on the things you are talking about called War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Yes, it is very strange - but then again group psychology is extremely complex, we are all subject to such behavior, depending on our life's circumstances.

Thanks. Good to see it available for free. :up:

Sure, I think that's the type of guidance this type of thinking aims to, not meant to be taken literally as right-in-this-moment-in-time.

But I also get the impression that because "living in the moment" can be ambiguous - it can lead one to defeat the purpose of the exercise. Sure, your interpretation is sensible, but a person entering this naively or worse, reading a self help book, will force themselves to live in the moment. But I don't think living in the moment can be forced, or at least it's not sustainable for long periods of time.

It might even be an easier way to get in, by getting lost in something. Writing, reading a novel, listening to music. Then you can extrapolate to more mundane events: being in traffic, waiting for a long time at a doctors office, etc.

"Living in the moment" comes in ebbs and flows, though practitioners of Zen might be able to do it at will, after much training.

Sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check it out.

I've yet to see that one. Yay, more doom and gloom.

Just what I need given the state of the world. :wink:

Yeah. I'm no fan of the Chinese government, but it is surrounded by countries that have the capacity to hit them with nukes. It's not surprising they are responding in kind.

But it will likely lead to escalation...

The story of Arkhipov is quite nuts:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man

Yep. The Cuban Missile crises was averted by one Russian general who refused to launch a nuclear missile as his submarine was being bombed.

Now people don't worry about nuclear weapons, when, as you say, the situation in Taiwan is extremely delicate. WWII is the exception, which could have been avoided had The Treaty of Versailles not been so harsh with Germany.

War is still about money and power.

Putting births aside, incest is extremely hardwired in most cultures (all?) as being unacceptable. If it weren't for the babies part, what makes it feel repugnant?

There's the issue of abuse of minors, that's obviously horrific. So we'd have to put that aside to. So incest would be ok IF precaution is taken to avoid making a baby and IF there is no child abuse going on.

I don't have any studies or anything, but I'd suspect that sexual desire of a family member would usually begin early in life. I remember reading The Incest Diary, by a daughter who was abused by her father. It was very strange to read.

Sex began early, but I don't recall her calling it rape (or abuse, I don't recall the terminology she used) until later on, which makes sense. Many victims don't know what rape or abuse is until they're older.

I'm just having a hard time understanding incest, must be biological.

As two time recipient of the medal of honor, Smedley Butler said:

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses...

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912...

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

:up:



Many people here are posting the same thoughts as I have better than me. Oh well.

I think that @Joshs makes a very good point. I'll put my spin to it though: of course living in the moment sounds trivial, yet it is far from it. In fact, it's literally impossible to do, for as soon as I focus on the moment, it has passed. So If I keep reminding myself to live in the moment and fail every time, because moments are passing by, I'll necessarily get stuck in a circle I should not have dug in the first place.

I don't know much about Zen, but in my experience speaking with people who do follow some version of it, I don't really find much of a difference between it and someone who has reached a certain age in which they are at peace with life, things don't bother them much, they accept the bad and the good. It's a kind of attitude of acceptance. But I don't know what Zen adds to that, as it can be used for good or ill.

it follows that (mind)ing can also conceived of as physical. — 180 Proof

It's good to hear someone uttering these words. I say this frequently and I fully believe experience exists. But it's physical. This is not a contradiction in terms.

I'm not part of a team nor do I agree with Wayfarer on everything. I just thought it was a well thought out reply. But likewise, I've got to give you credit for being so tenacious and articulate in the way you think about this topic. :up:

What do you mean by encode?

Yes. Philosophers often invent technical terms which differ substantially from ordinary language use that leads to mistakes. "Representation", "content", "event" and so on.

You're right that positivism is in many ways the opposite of OLP in so far as they used different Wittgensteins as a point of departure from which these philosophies developed.

The similarity I see is that both seek clarity of exposition in trying to deal with traditional problems, both focusing on language use as a way to proceed. I didn't mean to imply that OLP had a theory of knowledge. It's a method as you say.

Not that you say this at all, but it is a mistake to think that OLP (or language-use philosophy in general) originated in the 20th century in terms of having no precursors. Thomas Reid's work on the topic of language use is very interesting as he focuses on the way "the vulgar" (the common folk) use to talk about problems that philosophers get engrossed with. It's interesting and insightful to find aspects of OLP style thinking back then.

EDIT: To be fair, I should speak of language use philosophy as opposed to OLP as I don't adhere to it.

For me OLP is mostly a method used to try and dissolve some traditional philosophical questions. I think that this is useful in some instances. On the other hand, I'm not so confident any single major problem in philosophy has been solved by OLP.

I think that topics like "what it's like", "mind-body problem" and a few others can be, if not solved, then thought about properly using ordinary language. But these issues continue going.

And who belongs in OLP is also a bit messy. As you say, Austin, Strawson and other get grouped under this heading. At the same time, it seems to me as if some facets OLP are be closely related to logical positivism.

Carnap comes to mind as someone who tried to use ordinary language to solve "big problems". Also A.J. Ayer.

Yeah, I agree. I don't necessarily follow Rovelli, particularly with his view that there isn't a metaphysical substrate or existence absent relations. I think physical stuff exists independent of us.

But I also appreciate someone trying to make sense of QM as is, which makes for an interesting thought process when taken seriously, as opposed to Chopra-style woo.

It's also not clear to me that we actually can suspend metaphysical inclinations: even the most avowed anti-metaphysician has a metaphysics, sometimes a variety of positivism or some kind of view related with sense data.

Yeah, that could be attempted trying to figure out what are the instances in which people use words to either refer or shout or anything else people do with words.

It just seems to me that finding conditions for these things to be very complex, involving many factors that often are taken for granted. Like paying chess, we use the word "queen" to designate a piece which can move freely on a board (this doesn't include throwing the queen at your opponents face) . Of course there need not be any physical queen (in terms of the plastic piece called a "queen") there, you could do it with a stone. Or with anything else, in fact you can use the chess piece which we call a "king" as a "queen".

You don't even need a chessboard to play chess, nor another player. You need to know the rules of chess, which are different from the rules of society. And so on. It can become extremely difficult to pin down all the conditions in which it is correct to say that we are using the words pertaining to a game of chess correctly, though we plainly do so.

:clap:

Rovelli doesn't agree with the MWI, not that that means I agree with him or not. His idea is that we should let the science say what the metaphysics is, not let our metaphysics guide our science. I take him mean that people who adhere to MWI have the intuition that the world must be deterministic, but the world isn't so.

How'd you think about this?

Not mentioned yet is the even more radical alternative: the worlds that branch out are made of words. That is, at bottom, you actually see text in the wave function!

:cool:

Happens very frequently, unfortunately. Just reading Haaretz once every few weeks, some killing takes place, as if expected to happen.

Either words refer or they don't. You can use many types of examples or counterexamples in the traditional style, but the point can be made more concisely by now. I'm only saying that people refer, it's an act that people do. They can refer with words, as is often the case, or with gestures.

Just to comment, I bought Rovelli's Helgoland on a whim and I read it in a day, though it's not long to be fair.

What a wonderful book. I very much like his interpretation of QM and the way he thinks about all the complications associated with it, the book has very much a philosophical flavor. Not that I agree with him on all points, but highly recommend it for people interested in the topic: quite easy to read and understand. Simply great stuff.

And knowledge, and explicitness and order, etc. ;)

It's a delicate balance imo. Not that reality isn't shaped to a very large extent by us, I agree with you on that point. But to think of ourselves as bigger than we are is a problem. Much misery came our way when we thought we were the center of the universe or that the sun went around us.

We've done remarkable things to discover all these new facts about the universe. But I think we ought to keep in mind our animal part, while appreciating our amazing intellectual capabilities. So no, I don't think we are "merely" another species, but I also don't think we should be too proud, as we burn our planet to ash.

I know. I believe the view that human beings are specifically relevant for collapse is a minority one, though this by no means implies it is wrong at all.

I think they're trying to maintain the intuition of determinism. They don't like that current QM is probabilistic is my guess. I don't know what they'd do, but since there's no way to test it, arguments as to its implausibility is going to change minds. They know Many Worlds is pretty wild.

Unless we build a much larger collider, we seem to be stuck. And even that might not change the results.

A bit surprising to see that even here. Which is why it is important to state what you (or anyone) take idealism to entail.

But no serious idealist would ever say that a rock is not solid or that I can move an apple by thinking about it or whatever craziness they may say.

In either case for QM, I know you think observation is crucial for the collapse. I personally think that despite what QM discovers, idealism, materialism, objectivism or anything else remain intact. Anyone who already believes in one of these views will simply accommodate the experiment to whatever metaphysical views they already have.

Probably not the best way to go about it, but I think it's true at this point in time.

In remember that quote exactly! Wonderful book. But man that was quite a silly thing for Popper to argue. It takes so much for granted, which is a common mistake or so it seems to me.

I remember reading Zizek on Badiou, if memory serves, where he praises Badiou as finding a way beyond the 'postmodern sophists', and yet it is not clear just who he refers to with that term. — Janus

Zizek is quite entertaining and often says interesting things. But if Lacan does not count as someone of which the term "postmodernism" is correctly used on, then we aren't talking about anything.

Perhaps Zizek has Lyotard in mind, maybe Derrida or Baudrillard.

As noted, the example of nothingness may come to mind. Carnap devoted an essay on the impossibility of metaphysics, it had a strong flavor of "ordinary language philosophy". But it's an open question as to if Carnap succeeded in showing that metaphysics is nonsense.

Today, I'd guess most philosophers would disagree.

One example that comes to mind is in the topic of "reference". There are all these paradoxes as to how can we talk about things that don't exist? Pegasus, Zeus, etc.

But if you think about a it a little, you soon figure out that referring is an act people do, it's not something that a word does. That can be an ordinary language philosophy solution to a problem. But there's bound to be disagreements.

I wouldn't want to repeat exactly what I said in the other thread, so I'll perhaps say something closely related but not identical:

Something is needed in so far as it solves a problem or is generally speaking useful. This last part of being useful is subject to the "but what's useful depends on the person" - type argument. I don't see how the main figures in postmodernism helped much. If someone thinks that writing obscurely or playing with words is substantive, then fine, it is useful for a few people.

I fail to see why "metanarratives" are a better way of talking that speaking of "points of view" or "perspectives". That language games can be used to create a certain framework to stifle or control or shape thought and discourse, is not new either. Orwell wrote about that quite clearly.

The onus is on those that think that postmodernism is needed to explain why.

That's my impression too.



It's more difficult to gain a following if one speaks in plain sentences.

I agree, speculative realism and object oriented ontology are interesting and make sense in that the general ideas can be grasped. It's by now extremely hard to come up with some philosophical work that will "revolutionize" the field. But who knows?

There's an apparent limit to obscurity. I just hope the next hip thing in philosophy is at least intelligible.

So, was postmodernism a historical epoch? Is it over?

Ha. I guess I should not be surprised that people here defend it as an advancement in philosophy. But it's not clear if it says something new that's not terminological in nature: "metanarratives", "episteme", etc.

I suppose I'd like to know what has replaced it, post-post modernism?

Seems to me modernism never finished...

Yes, you're right, I didn't express myself as clearly as I should have.

I get the impression that the average US citizen knows less about the world than a Canadian or European, but I could be way wrong and there are exceptions, of course. Most people mostly care about things around them.

I do notice, however, that news in other countries outside the US have much more info on world affairs than US news does.

I am very much a Chomsky type, but I'm also interested in how other powerful actors wield power.

States are responsible in so far as they are powerful actors in international relations. The US is the most powerful state but that doesn't mean that China or Russia aren't powerful too. This isn't a good guy bad guy view, I think it's just factual.

The current EU is quite a mess. It's not democratic in any meaningful sense of the word and if it doesn't find a way to unite politically I fear it may crumble. Once Biden came in the US was far more effective than many European countries in administering the vaccines. As long as developing countries are significantly behind in vaccinations rate, this will go on and on.

No, it's been my experience.

This is probably more accurate:

https://www.cfr.org/news-releases/americans-lack-knowledge-international-issues-yet-consider-them-important-finds-new

:lol:

Yes. That is a problem with many Americans which is quite unfortunate. Obviously the US is far from "a city on a hill", nor paradise, it has serious problems with poverty and violence and it is also a big country.

But many Americans just really don't seem to care about the world outside the US. What happens in Europe, South America, Asia or wherever else just doesn't matter much. It's as you say, only if it directly affects domestic politics that many get riled up.

It's not that anybody should know European or Japanese politics inside out or anything like that, but to have a general interest in the world should not be seen as exotic.

Of course, there are exceptions to this, but I think it is broadly speaking true. And getting confrontational with China can literally be suicidal. Let's hope things don't get completely out of hand...

Ah, good information. Sounds somewhat like transcendental idealism, similar to Kant or the Neoplatonists. I think what you say has to be true as a matter of fact: because we are the way we are, we view the world as it appears to us, not as it is in itself or from a "view from nowhere".

Where I disagree is with the idea that consciousness is passive. I think it may appear to be passive, but I think it's constantly active. It's always intentionally-anchored (about) object or thoughts, real or fictional. If you close you eyes and cover you ears in a dark room. You will see plenty of activity. It seems as if consciousness is just "wanting" to be anchored in something that "makes sense."

But in general, I think what you say is on the right path.

Perhaps if you expand your idea a bit more, it would be easier to answer. To say that perceptions, experiences and identity are stored memory doesn't say much about the title of the thread. So first of all, in relation to the title, you might want to say what you mean by reaction consciousness.

Do you mean to suggest that consciousness is necessarily reactive? Why can't it be essentially active? The world having a function is surely something we state about the world and not a fact about it.

Perhaps you have in mind the idea that we create everything through consciousness. In short, say a bit more and try to see if you find a relation between the ideas. Only then can someone give an assessment of the general idea.