What you say is true given a certain account of philosophy. One could make a distinction between "materialism" and "idealism" up until around the time Newton discovered "action at a distance".

Materialism in those times meant mechanistic materialism: in terms of thinking of "bodies" as more or less complex machines such as clocks. It is our intuitive way of understanding the world. Newton believed in mechanistic materialism, but he had to give it up:

''It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact,... [this] is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.

[Italics mine]

For some reason which is quite obscure, later philosophers, like Gilbert Ryle ridiculed "the ghost in the machine", but he was mistaken. What was exorcised was the machine, not the ghost. Some materialists today try to do away with mind, but the matter they are trying to eliminate is not the matter that exist. The matter that exists includes consciousness.

So if we're going to use the word "physical", we apply it to everything that exists. It would be bizarre to say that the brain is physical but not the mind.

If this is unconvincing, you can use the term "nonphysical" for everything. The thing is we cannot make sensible metaphysical distinctions between mind and matter or between physical or non-physical.

Sorry for the length, I get carried away and it's hard to be concise without sounding like an alien.

Facts don't indicate what exactly? Facts cannot indicate anything outside the material realm, since facts are empirically observable phenomenon. For this reason, it doesn't seem correct to expect facts to provide indications about aspects of reality beyond the material realm. — emancipate

I didn't have you in mind for my comment, I was just reacting to 180's comment.

I don't understand what "beyond the material" means. Until someone can tell me why the mental or consciousness cannot be material (physical) too, I don't follow the argument.

I'm only sticking to my experience, I cannot speak for anyone else of course. The closest think that comes to mind concerning say, that state after death is the period before birth. If I remember to my earliest conscious memory and try to go "backward", I find that "nothing" seems to best capture such a state.

This is the only appeal I can make to some reality outside of me.

More than becoming (e.g. "making meanings"), we are always already disappearing. Deny it to your heart's content, there's no escape from this fact. Not by suicide. Not by murder. Not by faith or wishful-thinking. IMO, this is the meaning of "meaning-making" — 180 Proof

:lol:

:up:

I love it. Very much down Schopenhauer's alley, which has looked quite rational to me, if not sometimes a tad too pessimistic, but on a correct path by my lights.

But I don't understand why, for those that do believe, faith is not an escape. I'm not religious, if I were and I really thought there was life after now, that could be a relief of sorts.

The facts indicate that there's not an iota of evidence for this. Which is true. But with faith, evidence doesn't matter. So "meaning making" for a religious person might be framed in the context of "reward after death" or "fear of damnation after death."

More intelligent, maybe. But more conscious - I don't know. Something is either conscius or it's not. Birds, bees, humans are conscious - unless they're not - but one is not 'more conscious' than the other. But I'm sure that birds are more intelligent than bees, and humans more than birds. — Wayfarer

I think one can speak of being more or less aware, which must imply consciousness. Most people (myself included) are less aware right after waking up, than say, in the afternoon. Likewise, if someone has several drinks, after a point one can see a "decrease" in consciousness.

But you're main point, of either being conscious or not still remains.

But rather, living life, more often than not (*consciousness/subconsciousness) is both A AND B! — 3017amen

Yeah, making sense of things has always been not trivial for me too. :chin:

If it sounds good; it IS good-Miles Davis

That btw, was in response to too many musicians getting all twisted-up over music theory; diatonic scales/harmony, chords used for different/wrong key signatures. You know, analyze till you paralyze… .) Another Gee, is that what we're doing here, I wonder? — 3017amen

:up:

Davis is correct here too, if you like it then it's good. Simple as that.

Perhaps, on the music theory part.

In relation to metaphysics, I think that there is a difference between someone simply saying "It's all just one" and actually looking at different ideas, comparing and contrasting, talking to people, experiencing things and then saying "It's all one", or any other such idea.

If you press me, I cannot give better justification. But it seems to me to be the case.

Or, we could just get out of the fly bottle.

I like both being in and getting out.

As an important ancillary note, please know that music theory and mathematics confer no biological survival advantages. Alternatively, it seems we must ask meaning of life questions when discussing the nature of reality (ontologically speaking-in this case our forms of intuition) because we can't help it. Are we here by accident? — 3017amen

:100: :100: on the "advantage" angle, that's exactly right. Maybe the enjoyment of music is a kind of mutation or side effect in which, after certain creatures have some "off time", nature had to provide something to wade of boredom. Maybe music is the result? Total handwaving, I know.

I've had this quote stuck on my mind today, dunno why. But you gave me an opening to state it, since you mention music. :wink:

I think that, in many instances such as "meaning questions", Louis Armstrong's phrase can be applied:

“If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know."

Sure, we have to use some words to communicate, but anything we use will be very inadequate to explain what's actually going on in the case of non-human animals.

Sure, these might be signals roughly automatic. But maybe they have an "inner world", so they may also have something like aboutness in the mind, so it's plausible they have some kind of intentionality. We have no way of knowing.

It boils down to intuition in these cases.

A walking moose in the woods doesn't hit the tree and bounce from it to some direction, but he/she experiences the visual tree as an "obstacle" and accordingly orients itself. Is there some kind of "instinctual intentionality" involved even here, in this animal's behavior? — waarala

I'd have to guess certain animal cries refer to things in the world, such as "predator", "food", "danger", "mating", "territory" and so on.

If this is the case, as seems to be with certain monkeys for example, then we'd have to assume they have intentionality, if such animals are conscious, which we can only assume to be the case.

Here I think Chomsky's idea makes a lot of sense. Naturalism is, whatever is achieved by naturalistic inquiry.

By naturalistic inquiry, he has in mind theoretical explanations for certain phenomena of the world. Of course, theoretical inquiry only goes so far. So if we want to learn about things in which naturalistic inquiry makes little progress, or can't say much about, then we read literature or traditional philosophy or the arts.

This does not mean that these other forms of knowing are "artificial" or not natural, just that they don't give theoretical explanations about the world.

Put it another way: there are degrees of reality, such that what is more real, is also more worthy of being known. It jars with modern philosophy. That's because the idea of 'degrees of reality' was lost from medieval times. — Wayfarer

Yes. I read a metaphysical project by one philosopher recently who speaks in similar terms. But she speaks about it in relation to fiction, not among different objects or things in the world. It makes sense to speak of having more or less reasons for believing in something and it would appear that having less assumptions when considering something might be an indication of its impact to you.

In this sense, It makes more sense to me think of different aspects of reality as opposed to saying something is more real than some other thing.

Having said this, I would agree that consciousness is the thing with which we are most acquainted with and thus must be the most "concretely" realized aspect of nature. Beyond that, it's less clear to me to speak about some thing being "more real" than another, with the exception of the mentioned example of fiction.

This video is a little long - sorry, but if you are really interested it gives a good idea of the current state of research. — Pop

I'll check it out. Thanks.

I can't help but take the bait sometimes. Mainly because I'm incredulous that they are taken seriously. — Wayfarer

:up:

I just get bored. Sometimes I get mad, but there's more to the world than brain-talk.

Because, as I tried to show, the original conception of 'reason' was far more encompassing than it's modern use as 'an instrument'. It encompassed 'reason' in the grand sweep of things, 'the reason things exist', anchored against a metaphysic which saw reason as something that animated the Universe. — Wayfarer

Sounds something like the idea of "the great chain of Being." Such a view may make reason stronger than in it really is, in the sense that we, as human beings, are probably the only creature that use reasons to make sense of the world. I think we use it intermittently.

Then there's something to be said about intuition too when it comes to epistemology. But that's quite hard to speak about sensibly. But we use it all the time.

Well, we all know the various theories we can adopt here. But the matter or realism versus idealism doesn't interest me much. I'll take quantum waves even though I have no idea what these are. I hold the view that speculative theories about the reality of things in themselves doesn't bring me anything useful. — Tom Storm

Interesting.

Thanks for sharing.

This place is full of it. ;-) — Wayfarer

Then there's a lot of stuff to argue about. But I don't think arguing with people who agree with Dennett or Churchland(s) to be fruitful in any way. Other things, sure, but not eliminitavism.

We cannot fully separate ourselves from the world, it's not possible. We can retreat from view to an extent, but in the end it comes back to the cash value we make of the stuff we interpret, not a "view from nowhere."

But, this is philosophy. If 3 people agree, there's a problem. Heck, if one person agrees with himself on everything, that's probably bad too. :razz:

To me, these ideas aren't any more absurd than a platonic reality (Demiurge). — 3017amen

Which is not so bad. How we can cash out Platonic reality, is difficult.

Speaking of that, one question could be, can a bridge be built between the existence of abstract mathematical structures and an abstract cosmological God, from which abstract consciousness produces innate Kantian sense of wonderment and causation ? — 3017amen

Well, to speak of God, I'd need to know what kind of entity you have in mind. Is it an all powerful being, supremely good or is it something else? To me, God can be interesting metaphorically, such as the way Mainländer discusses the topic. But literally speaking, I don't find the idea convincing.

Consciousness seems to me to be concrete actually: the most concretely existing thing we can know, as we have it. This of course raises question of what concreteness is, but if what I say is correct (and I could be very wrong) then we need to reconsider our notion of "concrete." The awe is there, no doubt about it. :)

I do think that Schopenhauer's Will is the most promising of these ideas, which perhaps brings us closest to the "thing in itself" that I can think of. Perhaps it needs a slight reformulation, but I find it persuasive.

Pretty much 'post Enlightenment philosophy'. A strict division between what can be known by the natural sciences and what is deemed not to be thus knowable. Closely intertwined with empiricism, the view that only what can be detected by the senses (and instruments) is to be considered real. The other component is 'positivism'. — Wayfarer

Ah, gatcha. Thanks.

As thus stated, this leaves out a lot of stuff concerning the mental. Unless one takes the mental to be fundamental in interpreting sense data...

Some of them were much nearer to naturalism than others, but platonism did not operate from naturalist presuppositions. — Wayfarer

Hey. Just to know, what is it that you have in mind when you speak of naturalism?

This isn't intended to argue in favor of anything, just getting your perspective on similar topics:

So these physical objects you have in mind, do they exist mind-independetly, as in, before people existed there were trees, but only after we arose is that the notion or idea of a tree got articulated?

In other words, there are physical objects which have objective properties and we discover these objective properties when we interact with such objects.

By things in themselves, I take to mean the ground of objects which are not a representation. I don't have in mind Kant, per se, just the general topic.

To illustrate the example in a way I find intuitive and useful: consider any object. Take a book and put it in front of you. You see it, there's a book there. Fine. Now close your eyes. Is there still a book there? Sure. You can touch it, hear it as when you drop it on a table, etc. But now remove your tactile sensations. Do you still have a book in front of you?

You could probably still hear it, maybe smell it. But now lose your sensation of hearing and smell and all other sensations. Assume this happens all at once and automatically. Do you still have an object in front of you?

I think you do, at least as an idea of sorts.

This is more or less what I have in mind when I speak of things in themselves. I think things have a nature which are not reducible to sensations and not dependent on the way objects affect us.

Maybe it leads nowhere, but I find it interesting.

Absolutely! Civility and politeness and being nice to others is fundamental. Otherwise we get nowhere.

I agree in part with what you say. I do think that people get invested in things they don't know. On the other hand, I think that a big part of the general resentment, hatred and bigotry surfacing now are related to concern that people understand in the sense that, wages have been stagnant or declining for decades, jobs are less available and the super rich are gaining more and more power. People sense this and see it and are angry.

But they funnel such anger in the wrong direction: minorities, the vulnerable, "foreigners", etc., instead of concentrated power structures such as concentrated wealth and unaccountable bureaucracies.

Hah. Yeah, for sure. I call these the easy problems, just to highlight how easy they are. Utterly trivial really. :joke:

So tell me, do you think that non-mental being exists? That is existence that has no mental properties whatsoever?

Does science tell us about things in themselves generally? Can we have an idea of what they could be?

This last question torments me.

And what makes us so defensive when discussing opposite views? Why do we sometimes simultaneously reserve the right to be different while also expecting others to be like us? — Apollodorus

Belonging to a certain political orientation is tied with one thinks is correct or proper or on the right track so far as society and the world should go. Inevitably deep issues related to ethics, behavior and society are involved which are pretty important in terms of scope.

A certain amount of identity is tied into the beliefs we may have associated with politics, thus if someone holds an opposite view on an issue of importance, it can be taken as a kind of insult to the types of things you may hold dear. We also need to - for our sake - simplify the world to some extent, if we did not, there would be too much information to make sense of.

The thing is, when you speak in general terms to people of very different political views, we tend to find lots of areas of agreement: we want good education, good healthcare, more fair taxes, etc. When it gets down to how to get there, issues become very thorny.

There's a lot of stuff to go over in the "left" vs. "right" debate. In the US this divide as is presented in the mainstream is pretty narrow, I think. Europe is better in this specific regard, but barely.

But nonetheless - I am specifically interested in the 'downsides' of positive emotional states. Something like a 'toxic happiness' or happiness which stifles rather than expands the possibility of action. Or happiness which mocks, degrades, and incites violence. I'm trying to conceptualize joy as something that cannot be taken along these lines - a positive positivity. — StreetlightX

Hmmm. :chin:

Well there are the obvious things that come to mind, say, being happy with the use of a certain drug and maintaining that happiness with continual usage of such substances.

I guess that in the case of happiness which incites violence, you might have in mind something like certain strands of nationalism. Being happy that one belongs to X country as opposed to Y or receiving meaning from being a member of something like the Klan or such groups.

The problem I see in what you're getting at, is that, when is it reasonable to distinguish someone is being "happy" by merely subsisting on bad conditions, such as being fine that you can't get a better job, or being content that one is born to poverty and not wanting to improve such a situation vs. thinking about these cases in terms of being satisfied with what you got?

In these cases, a kind of toxic happiness may be what keeps such people alive.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a word used to explain another word, and this is supposed to be interesting. It’s really the incoherent ramblings of someone on the Internet. Even if it were true— who cares? Maybe everything is organization. Yes. Maybe everything is God, nature, energy, will, reason, objectivity, etc etc. Just add it to the list and then we can feel like we’ve accomplished something. — Xtrix

Sure, but isn't that true of all words? That is at bottom, when we continue explaining what a word means, we can only go to other words, until we reach the point of gesturing like a crazy person to an object saying "this is what I mean"! (Minus mathematics, I think.)

I think I understand what it means to have an organized room, or an organized schedule. Does that apply to the world? Not as we use the word ordinarily.

But if your approach is on the right track, why speak of "will" or "being"? It's not as if these questions need to have a theoretical answer applicable to the mind-independent world. As is the case with Locke and psychic continuity, for example. Or Goodman's idea of Starmaking.

Given the two options you present as presented, then yes, I think "joy" is better than "happiness".

I'd be satisfied with being "interested" in something, that is, being taken in by a subject, or person or event or place. It need not reach the "burden" of being in a positive emotional state necessarily.

Of course, if someone feels they are at rock bottom, then nothing may suffice for the time being. But I feel that with "interest" one can withstand considerable unpleasantness.

Hmmm. I have an idea of what it means to have a self. Granted, it's not much, but I make use of such a concept with relative frequency. Organization is a little tricky. Is the universe organized or disorganized?

One idea is that the universe is going towards disorder (entropy...) , in between the state that was the singularity and now, we've moved from "organized"(?) to disorganization, but since there's billions of years in between, we have some pockets where this "order" appears. That's Sean Carroll's view on the matter. Others disagree, such as Arieh Ben-Naim, who has studied entropy his whole life.

I'm not sure speaking of objects or creatures organizing is clear. Maybe they do, but what does organize mean in this situation?

As far as consciousness goes, it seems to me that there's an element of relevance that on occasion pops up, such as crossing a street and seeing a car about to hit you. In these moments one becomes very aware of things.

But a lot of it also seems to be kind of automatic. Sure, awareness is on all the time, but what becomes central to it is not subject to one's volition.

Ah. Then the question would be where does intentionality not arise in our mental life for Husserl?

A state of dreamless sleep comes to mind. I wonder about such cases as being completely lost in thought such that if someone interrupts you and asks "what are you thinking about?" You might not be able to give an answer.

Then again, it may arise in the latter scenario too.

Aboutness seems to be what intentionality is. These words seem to be inter-changeable. I'm sure some Husserlian can easily dispute that.

I'm simple minded in these topics, or at least I try to be. I often fail. Take a simple example. Look at your laptop or computer now. A large part of your consciousness is now directed at, focused on the laptop. Your conscious perceptions in this case is about the computer. But you could also focus on a word, any word, and as you focus on the word, instead of quickly reading over it, then your intentionality is directed at the word.

But this is speaking about concrete objects. You can have intentionality about your thoughts, absent concrete instantiation. If you think of a pink elephant, your aboutness is related to a thought, not a concretely existing thing.

You could be wrong about the causes of the aboutness. You could be dreaming that you are seeing a tree and you might think that the aboutness you have concerning the tree, is about an existing concrete thing, but it's not in this case.

I'm assuming much of our mental ruminations may not be about anything. That is there is no "directedness" between speech fragments and any object.

If we do not find some way for controlling fertility on a global scale, then nature will find a solution for us, and we won't like it. — Bitter Crank

:100:

As is said nowadays in Discord, Facts.

Hah. Yeah, that's one way to look at it, and something like that is probably true. I'd be nice for different people to inherent the Earth for a change. Maybe the planet wouldn't be on fire.

Then again, maybe not. :)

Objects in motion take place within time, as it were. It's a very strange concept if you examine it from our perspective. Like the typical situation: two people may be at a party, one of them has fun and time goes by very quickly, the other one is bored beyond words and is amazed time isn't "flowing". And many more such examples.

More problematic is what you seem to hint at, which is how to think about such matters such as a stone falling off a cliff before we existed.

Well said :up:

You raise good points. Here's my "but": I think some people are predisposed to feel and reflect more than others in the sense that they may feel more intensely or can't stop reflecting. If this is associated with negative events or occurrences, such a person could be in the middle of an oncoming tornado and these tendencies would not go away. Or if they do, it's only for a very short duration.

It's a problem. But, you make a good point.

Whatever it is, we enrich it by experiencing it. Presumably - or factually - time was "happening" or "going on" before we were born. So we came out of it, somehow. But I can't make sense of the concept of time, before my birth.

My experience of life doesn't apply beyond my life.

However I may feel about having or not having children, I don't think most people could be persuaded about absolute AN. If they have a pre-disposition to feel the darkness in the world, then they might be persuaded, had they not already reached AN conclusion.

It's a good question. I guess they might get some peace of some kind. Also validation that such arguments can work once in a while.

But if empathy was the main goal here, maybe helping others, in whatever way possible, would probably be better.

If all questions require prior knowledge - and all prior knowledge is in its own right answers to other questions - then everything is an assumption: both the question and the answer. We have this weird loop going on. — Benj96

Our best bet of answering some questions, is to have a range of criteria that allows for better or more accurate answers. What these criteria include, depends on the phenomenon you are looking at. Getting an answer in manifest (ordinary, lived-life) reality is quite different from getting an answer in science, it seems to me. But in either case, any answer we feel worthy of the name has to be "on the right track" for us, otherwise, how would we know what to do?

We can also frame words in a question-like manner, such as: Why are we able to think? Why are there many languages and not one? But such questions may not have answers.

When we get to science, what seems to be happening is that there is some kind of convergence between our mental faculties and certain aspects of the mind independent world. So no matter which questions we ask, the answer must come from us and we then apply it to the world.

But we could also be in stuck in a situation in which we can do no more than give approximate answers and are prevented from getting better answer because we lack the necessary capacities to find such answers. Perhaps to a Martian, the problem in unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity is trivial.

But reality includes includes anything we can think of. So, a first approach would be to say that a good question will hone in on those aspects of reality which you may want to clear up, while eliminating as much "noise" as possible. There's no guarantee, of course.

The topic of "innate knowledge" is fascinating, but extremely obscure.

Metaphysics, for me at least, is the underlying and fundamental logic that causes various phenomena. — Pop

It's an interesting formulation. The only concern on my part is that we try to avoid attributing self organization to the world, when it could be the case that we are the one's doing the organizing e.g. "starmaking", "ways of talking", etc.

It's not so clear to me how to distinguish these two when speaking about the world. The phenomena that arise fleeting in my consciousness seem to be fragmented, incomplete, sometimes random and repetitive. But it could be that when we write or speak to others, we are organizing whatever goes on in the head, in a more structured manner.

I assume something like this happens to other people.

If after we are long gone, an alien intelligence visits Earth and pokes around, they are going to think art was about it. They won't be impressed with anything else. Hopefully they will be able to hear our music. — James Riley

I'm sympathetic, the only caveat would be: this would be true if they have the same capacities for art that we have. Maybe they have an art we could not recognize as such and vice versa.

But as you imply, it is rather special. We have all this extra energy after we're done with basic needs. Then we go on putting colors on walls, or rhyming, then on to novels and films and paintings.

Not being precise exactly, speaking more loosely: it's as if whatever we create is the purpose for existence, whatever it is. And often it's some strange thing we call art.

From Wikipedia. But I first read it in Hand's Cosmosapiens, I believe:

Claude Shannon introduced the very general concept of information entropy, used in information theory, in 1948. Initially it seems that Shannon was not particularly aware of the close similarity between his new quantity and the earlier work in thermodynamics; but the mathematician John von Neumann certainly was. "You should call it entropy, for two reasons," von Neumann told him. "In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

I should add, Sean Carroll wrote an excellent book called The Big Picture. According to him entropy and the arrow of time explain almost everything in the universe, roughly.

I'm skeptical, but he could be correct.

Certainly. Nothing matters if you're starving. Once that and other basic needs are met, we're going to need something meaningful to give some sense to this world of ours. We're just born creative, inquisitive creatures.