Likely not. Susan Haack talks about this in Evidence And Enquiry. But from my perspective, I'm unsure how far such views take you. We don't have access to an infallible belief and we can't make an argument if we don't have a certain foundation of what it is we are trying to illustrate. We make use of whatever is relevant for each type of enquiry and use the relevant methods: math differs from biology which differs from psychology which differs from everyday living.

But I don't see how talking about foundationalism or coherentism solves issues concerning knowledge and belief in day to day affairs. In other words, a portion of epistemology doesn't seem to me to cast light on the problem of knowledge. Though I am the first to admit that maybe I'm missing the point or that this area in philosophy isn't for me.

Good. He really deserves it. One of the few who isn't afraid to go after evo devo dogma. And just writes really well on interesting topics, doesn't get bogged down in technicalities, which is somewhat rare in philosophy these days.

The context in which I ask the question is because it seems to me that whatever value or worth or significance a person has is being cast into doubt, at least by me, given how a large portion of the population in "developed" countries are behaving within this pandemic.

If people know the risks of going out to large social gatherings or sporting events and they don't mind dying or possibly killing someone, then I'm OK with it, so long as everyone consents to that activity. The problem is that many infected likely did not consent to others doing as they pleased.

But then this pushes the issue to a larger perspective, in which now we care about "our safety", when prior to the pandemic issues like the War on Yemen, Sanctions on Iran and anything else you can think of that doesn't apply to "the West", is just sidelined as if these things aren't that important. Sure. There are plenty of exceptions, people doing good work, getting informed, informing others, etc.

But it causes me to question how valuable we actually think people are in general. I often get the impression that it's not much.

Dictionary definitions do not come close to exhausting the meaning words. We'll end up defining words by other words in endless wordplay. You can choose to define value as "intrinsic worth", but then you'll reply nothing has intrinsic value.

Alternatively, you can think of value as: how should the life of an "average human being" be considered in terms of importance to you.

If that's not enough for you, then there's not much more to say.

"Okay, so you want to assign a different meaning to "value" which is not actually value, but something different."

I did not know that "value" was the kind of word which had only one meaning. I thought "value" could refer to several meanings including prices, ethics or a mathematical object.

It never occurred to me that "my" definition of value had to improve on traditional uses of the word when it is used in conversations about manifest reality. Clearly there is no common ground here, as people aren't replying to each other in a thoughtful manner.

"Yes, there is that kind of philosophy as well as the kind that concerns itself with proofs, truths and convergence."

There sure is. And if you stick to it and use it as the guide by which intelligent questions can be asked, then you leave out of it the vast majority of life. By all means feel free to start a thread about a new and improved meaning of the word "value", with a "goalpost" in sight. I would be much interested in seeing how that would work out.

I would gladly ignore posts that were empty of words.

If you want to take the question with a quasi-positivistic attitude or stance, then sure it is the wrong question, or a poorly phrased one. But if you don't approach it in this manner, then you can say things about it.

You ask, what is the value of God? I say, I don't believe in God. But I can say that plenty of people do, and to many, such a concept makes life bearable given otherwise miserable conditions. So in this respect, it would rank quite highly on lists of things with value. But it also has a negative side, what with all the fanaticism and intolerance, so in a final cost-benefit view framework, it has little value to me.

What is the value of time? Interesting question. From the most general perspective possible, time is that which allows anything to have value, for if there is no time, you can't value anything. Likewise, most people would like to live a relatively long time, instead of a short one. If we talk about physics, time is problematic in that it's not clear how it fits in with modern theories, as pointed out by Lee Smolin. So its "value" in this domain is not clear.

And so on.

It seems to me inevitable that we express ideas of philosophers in terms they did not use. Quite clearly with Plato and Aristotle, after all they didn't talk about "the hard problem", though they had much to say about the mind. With Leibniz, we wouldn't talk about monads, but we would speak of intrinsic properties of particles or fields.

Hume's theory of mind (and Locke's too) has been refuted by modern neuroscience, the brain/mind is simply not "white paper" or a theatre of ideas. With Kant, we no longer speak of "space" and "time" as separate things, but instead of spacetime.

It's likely that in the future, the terms we use will be outdated or simply won't capture the same phenomenon we are discussing, although there is overlap otherwise we couldn't talk at all.

What you say is true, if we read an encyclopedia or several, that explain certain ideas of people like Kant or Hegel or whoever, we miss out on reading them. On the other hand, what if when we read Kant or Hegel, despite trying as best we can, we simply don't get much out of it? I personally get quite a lot from Kant and Husserl scholarship, but much less so from Kant and Husserl themselves. Not so with Schopenhauer or Peirce.

There's always an "opportunity cost". We may take longer and read Kant entirely. We may understand it better than the scholarship we read. But if it takes us 3 months to read Kant vs. say, a week or two to read good or useful interpretations of him, we gain time to look at other things.

It's not an easy issue. But it seems to me that there are many ways to proceed, which is better than only one way.

It was meant in the broadest sense possible so as to include any interpretation. Human life compared to what? To anything else in nature, including other people.

Yes, I see where you are coming from when speaking about the most heinous of criminals. That's a fair point, if difficult to assimilate. But any answer is good really.

Then that's a problem. How can we be more or less confident that we know what a famous philosopher is saying? Is the point to be able to reproduce, word for word, the main insight from a major work? I get it that many of these figures did ask people to engage with them on some level. Sure.

But to do philosophy you don't need to read Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Descartes. You could do it through Rorty alone, or from a combination of Searle and Chalmers, or mixture of everybody. I think the point is to be engaged with certain ideas, but I understand if you say that these ideas are best expressed by a certain person. Maybe, but it's not clear to me that anybody is essential.

Yeah, this then goes into Russellian self-paradoxical situations of the set of all sets containing itself and so on. We can only wildly guess, but I suspect that in principle, everything could be contained in everything. The puzzles arise because we think the way we do, given that we are human beings. I assume there must be a "stopping" point in nature, unless the universe is infinite. If it is infinite, I can't even guess what the answer could be.

If such a being as God existed (and I'm non religious, I'm just making a statement), it would understand the whole of nature without any problems.

So either our mode of cognition leads us to paradox, or we are considering the whole idea of "containment" in such a manner that it leads us into paradox: for example, Zeno's arrow is only paradoxical if you consider reality to consist of mathematics, but when you realize it does not consist of numbers alone, you won't be puzzled when arrows hit targets.

Yeah you can say colours are illusions, that what matters or exists independently of us, are the wavelengths. But that's precisely not the quality people have in mind when they say look at the blue sky or the yellow dress. Reference to light waves as a confirmation that you are also seeing a yellow dress will end up in puzzled looks, and correctly so.

I think it is clear that quality and quantity are extremely different. We happen to emphasize two very different features of the world. We disentangle some of them by calling them "qualities" or "appearances" or "properties". We have another innate faculty, which for some reason which isn't clear, happens to pick out abstract natures about things, we call these "quantities" or "numbers".

What's 1 or 2 after all in relation to something in the world? Well, if you're going to apply quantity to something in the world, you are hollowing out a phenomenon, because you could be talking about 1 or 2 in relation to a coconut or a tiger or anything else you imagine.

So I don't see how quality is in any way an illusion.

It may not be everything. There may be other universes. As to what our universe - which admittedly may be the only one - expands into, saying "nothing" doesn't make much sense in any manner.

We are already way beyond our intuitions when speaking about this, so the short answer is that we don't know. Can the universe contain itself, sure, why not? It makes no sense? Well what's up or left in space? There isn't an up or a left in space, but we manage to navigate this somehow.

Depends on several things, two of which stand out to me:

1) What do you mean by "physicalism"? Do you mean it analogous to something like what Dennett has in mind or Galen Strawson? If you mean Dennett, then it makes no sense. If you mean Strawson, then it's not possible. If you have someone else in mind or your own view of what it is you should offer a brief example, definition or explanation.

and

2) Are they possible? Well, probably no. But what about cases when people sleep walk, that's almost a p-zombie. People who are sleepwalking may or may not "imagine" they are doing something, so consciousness could be absent in real life cases. This says little about consciousness or behavior.

That's sensible on the whole. And it is a curious tendency that many people tend to find some of these figures interesting at a certain age bracket.

One thing I don't agree with, or at least I don't see it as you do, is the topic of dividing philosophy between "meaningful life" and "ultimate questions". You don't think they can be clearly divided, I think they mostly can.

I don't see how speaking about how consciousness arises, asking if the world is ideal or speaking about the nature of identity has much to say about what makes a life good or not. In Classical Greece, you could argue that for them mathematics and ethical behavior could be incorporated into a whole system. But even then it was nebulous. I don't see how these issues connect at all today - apart from the fact that they are both human activities.

We haven't been able to understand consciousness in over 2000 years. Some are now hopeful neuroscience will tell us what it is and how it works, I think that view is very mistaken and they basically are engaged in a category error: thinking that the brain with all it's interactions, will explain how appearances are possible. These are different epistemic domains.

The same problem arises with the self. We don't know what it is. But unless we think about it in a different manner and consider it perhaps as an agglomeration of many facets of reality, we will continue with these puzzles about if I am the same person as yesterday. Atoms and quarks and all that physics stuff are way down the explanatory ladder and are much simpler than human beings. I understand that, given the success of physics, some look to it to explain consciousness or the self. But can physics explain laughter or thoughts?

Why not? I think it should be clear, these things are just very, very different and require different ways of thinking about them.

Given how infrequently one remembers them, I've managed to retain some memories of them by will, though I've heard that writing them down helps. In so far as they suggest things you should do or they reflect anxieties or whatever else, yeah they can have that meaning. But it's similar to life, in the sense that we provide meaning to them, not so much the dream itself.

I'm skeptical of psychoanalysis of any variety. They (Freud, Jung, etc.) do have some interesting things to say, but I think they fall way short of someone like William James. It doesn't seem to lead anywhere, outside of staying within an arbitrary framework and people keep guessing if X may mean fear, anxiety or repression.

Not that it doesn't have any uses, it does. But thinking in terms of mythological quests or heroic quests or something like that can be very misleading. But if it helps you understand yourself then whatever works is good in cases like these.

That's a lot of questions, much of them the classical ones. I think we enter into even more difficulties, instead of less problems, if we start doing the transportation experiment, in which .01% of you isn't the other person, but that 0.1% happens to be the real you.

We have very different ways of thinking about the self and consciousness which need not fall under the "materialism" of science, which is a misleading term, I think. Ok, so let me try to answer one of your questions:

When you wake up are you the same person as yesterday? First, I need to ask, is this a factual question? It's not clear to me that it is. For if we say "yes", I am the same person as yesterday, yet I'm slightly skinner and some of my cells have changed or died off. So yes, I'm the same person except in those parts in which I'm not. But I don't know which parts of me have changed, it seems to me that I'm exactly the same person I was yesterday.

In other respects, we can, if we so choose, act as if from *now* on, we will be completely different. So we can speak of yesterday's me, and the me from now on. I'm certainly not the same as I was when I was a child, but I'm similar in some respects. It seems to me that the self refers to many phenomena which we mistakenly take to be one single thing. It probably isn't. It includes many facets which fit under one theme "self", but if we take one aspect apart, the concept falls apart.

It's a bit like a country. A country isn't it's borders, it's its flags, it's citizens and so on. But if you move the border, you are standing outside the country. Likewise, if you change the flag of the country, you aren't speaking about the same country before the new flag. Same if totally different people displace other people, then the country isn't the same and so on.

That's my guess, but it's an extremely hard question.

No, I don't think life has a meaning or purpose, outside of what we give it. More and more I'm drawn to the idea of life - experience - this thing here and now, is a dream, similar to what Schopenhauer said. That's a bit misleading in that life is not the type of dream one wakes up from. But from the "perspective" of the universe, a person dying is akin to when waking up from a dream, we "kill" the characters in the dream.

Is this in anyway helpful in thinking about meaning and purpose? Well, do dreams have a purpose or meaning? The only answer that makes sense to me is that it is we who seek to interpret and give meaning to a dream, not the dream itself. So in this regard, life is on a similar footing. Is it an experiment as well? Sure. I don't see what prevents you from treating it as such.

It depends on the person, the idea under discussion and how the author is received. It can and often does help to read the classics, but I don't think it's mandatory to need to read anybody specifically. But this depends on each person's goal. I think it's a mistake to insist that you need to read X's thoughts on the self to understand the topic. It can help, but it may not. Novels may do a better job, or talking to a group, etc. The idea is to keep the approach to the topic broad, but not so broad so as to include New Age stuff. It's a hard line to draw.

As for "the challenge the authors required from the reader", maybe? I don't think difficulty for the sake of difficulty is good. The topics themselves are already very hard, so making it more difficult doesn't necessarily help out much. If the topic under discussion or the way somebody writes causes you to think from a different perspective, then that's obviously good. I have in mind people like Wittgenstein or Nietzsche as people who fall under this category.

I'm very liberal here. I don't even think you need to read more than one philosopher to "do philosophy" well. I'd go so far as to argue that those who say you have to have read Plato or Descartes or whoever, are potentially putting people off. What matters are the topics and what you think about them. We already know what Plato, Descartes and Hume said about these things. If any philosopher helps you in your pursuit, then that's all you need.

Given the era we live in, you have so many ways to get philosophy, you can see lectures online, you can see documentaries, you can participate in forums like this one, you can read any part of any philosopher you like while ignoring the rest. In short, I think it's a big mistake to focus on what X philosopher said. It's only valuable so long as you get something out of it. If you don't get anything out of it, then it has no value.

I think so too. I still have trouble believing that he (and the Churchlands', etc) actually think that consciousness is an illusion. It's a bit like insisting human beings are horses or something.

Well, that would be an interesting option. How far would the qualia waves go? It's one thing to say that it is redlike would it also be roselike? Depending on how far this goes, you'd end up with the "two worlds" problem of naïve realism: a world "out there" and a similar one in my head.

It does sound much better than NCC though.

Ha. Maybe, I don't have any moral problems with that. :p

The issue, as I see it, is what does it even mean to say that an experience "maps" on to cells, or to brain matter even? Maybe an optimal science will say something like, the basal ganglia interacting with brocas area at time T3 causes the prefrontal cortex to activate in this specific pattern when it sees a Blue Jay.

Ok, fine. But the experiential quality of the blue jay is not explained by these types of brain experiments. When someone looks at a brain at T3, there is nothing blue about it, there isn't a bird inside and so on. Sure, it sounds silly, but that's the problem. It's like the difference between seeing a red rose and then speaking about light waves. Sure, light waves are involved in me seeing the rose, but they say nothing about that colour I see in the world, which we call "red".

Though to be fair, science can't explain gravity, it's a given. It's behavior is studied and predicted, but what it is, we don't know. From this perspective, it's all a mystery.

Maybe an optimal science of brain might be able to say what areas of the brain are responsible for consciousness. But we've mapped all 300 or so neurons of a nematode, and nobody understand why it does what it does.

Prospects don't look much better for human beings. Also, what sense does it make to say that you are objectively explaining something subjective? Something's missing in that idea.

I think the answer to this depends on what type of topic you have in mind. If you're talking about the starting point of the universe, then that's one question. Some argue that it simply was the beginning of the universe, to ask what came before it is a bit like asking what's south of the south pole while you're standing on it. Others speak of cyclical universe in which the universe eventually contracts and it all starts over again. Yet other speak of multiverses. Who knows?

If you have in mind the starting point of an event, say, WWII or something, then yes, there will always be an arbitrary stipulation of some kind. To say that such an event caused or began WWII, for example, you'd have to be able to provide some reasonable causal explanation between the event you have in mind, and the start of the war. But as you say, it suffers from infinite regress and speaking about casual relations in international affairs is very difficult, given how many people are involved.

Maybe this is a cheap way out, but I'd say that whatever fits your intuitions best is the most reliable "starting point" for "normal life" questions. For example you see someone slip and break a bone. What caused that? Well you happened to catch someone throwing a wet towel at the person. If someone asks what caused him to break his bone, your intuition would be to say that the person who throw the towel was the starting point of the events that lead to a person breaking a bone.

You will always be able to complicate the situation more by asking "what starting point led the person who throw the towel want to throw it?" And then you'll get stuck. So I think our intuition here is the safest bet in manifest reality. Science is a different matter.

That makes more sense than thinking of "mental" and "physical" as opposites of some fundamental kind. I mean, the way it looks to me is that the mental is the outgrowth of physical configurations. Then the mind represents aspects of the world. But we speak of "physical objects", like a laptop or a tree, because we don't think they depend on mind completely, otherwise, we are bound to say that the world is 100% made by me. If it were, why can't I know the nature of physics or psychology just by thinking about them?

"Real" is an honorific term. If I say this is the "real truth" or the "read deal", I shouldn't be understood as saying that there are two kinds of truth or two kinds of deals, I'm only emphasizing my statement.

We no longer know what bodies are, we used to think we knew what they were back in Descartes' time, but now we don't. The materialism of those times was mechanistic. The only viable alternative to that would be something like Galen Strawson's "Real Materialism" the idea that everything is physical. And we use the term out of convince because we want to talk about the world "out there" as well as the mind.

Bodies were taken to be mechanistic entities that worked by direct contact: one object directly affects another object and so on. It's the way we intuitively understand the world, but it is literally false, the world doesn't work this way. Newton proved it and he could not believe that "bodies" weren't "physical" in the sense of working by direct contact, he said that:

"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."

Now the terms physical or mental are vague terms used to highlight features of certain aspects of reality, without a sharp distinction being made as if they were polar opposites. I think it makes more sense to say that everything is physical, and that the mental is part of physical reality. If you prefer to invert that and say that everything is mental, then you have the extra burden of trying to show that a world absent people (a mind-independent world) exists at all.

You escape that dualism by being aware that in saying "mental reality precedes physical reality", you aren't stipulating that the mental and the physical are somehow opposites. Unless you believe they are opposites, though I'm not sure why this should be the case.

I understand your point about our epistemology being mental. But if the mental isn't also physical, then I don't see how you can escape idealism, unless you defend dualism. If you defend idealism, then that's fine.

What other reality is there? You can say mental reality, but mental reality is part of physical reality. Physical is a better word actually, because things exists which aren't matter: energy, dark energy, dark matter, etc. Most of the universe isn't even made out of baryonic matter, which is all we know and interact with in our day to day living.

If by "awareness" you have in mind the kind of thing people who use this word take it to mean, then no DNA has no awareness. If you invent a technical term and call it "awareness", then it is liable to be misleading, but it can be done, you'd have to clarify what this term means.

But it's probably safest to steer away, as much as one can, from "mentalizing" language and say that DNA follows patterns or laws. Much of this depends on how you think about teleology.

Exactly. There's just no ideas one can engage with that may be of some interest. I'm forgetting who it was that said this, but the argument was along the lines of "Japan has one of the most homogenous societies in the world" and thus they have very little internal conflict. Yeah ok, they have plenty of other problems. They're out of substantive things to say.

Say what you will about people like Hayek or Schumpeter or anyone from the Austrian school. One could very much disagree with what they were saying and in fact provide evidence as to why such ideas (encasing markets- a Quinn Slobodian puts it) don't work out in practice. But such ideas like Hayek arguing that we have imperfect knowledge of most situations, and therefore markets unite all our knowledge and thus "knows best", has some sophistication.

Mises was at least consistent. He didn't want governments to do anything during The Great Depression, just let the markets find a solution -even if it includes massive suffering. Other neoliberals, like Röpke, saw the problems with laisse-faire and consciously attempted to create legislation (through the WTO, etc.) that would help insure power and privileges' to certain economic actors.

But today, talking about Bannon or Spencer and there ideas are so crude, so tribal and obviously deranged, you don't need to exercise a single neuron to reply to them.

Damn. I got a pang in my head as I read your answer. Psychobabble, hierarchy chaos and the dragons. And lobsters too.

Makes even Ron Paul look far more sophisticated.

Ah. Sorry mixed the context. :p

Still, I'd like to know just who in the heck do people have in mind when they speak of "right wing intellectuals", I'm actually curious. I can only come up with the "classic liberal economists". I'm guessing there might be someone else.

What is this Atlas Shrugged 2?

I presume you have in mind people like von Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Ropke and the like, right?

Otherwise who is left? Ayn Rand? Ben Shapiro? These people aren't serious.

The thing is these right wing economists are left-wing on many aspects of social life, so they're not "right" all the way through. At the moment, I don't see who could be considered an intellectual of much note in the right.

I was wondering who else you might have in mind.

Already points 2 and 3 are very problematic. I doubt the vast majority of research is done to "edit our environment", it's mostly done out of curiosity.

But putting that aside, there's a problem here with the word "knowledge" which has somewhat English specific connotations. To say that knowledge "feeds back on itself, resulting in an ever accelerating rate of knowledge development", implies that knowledge is a "thing" that self-increases and further builds on itself. Not quite, people use the results of scientific experiments, in a manner that a portion of it could be called "knowledge" of a theoretical variety, not the the type of knowledge one gets by wielding power, for example.

Of course, there's then a bunch of stuff in research that is useless and can be thrown away. But power and knowledge are quite different in this respect, because as mentioned, the knowledge provided by science is not the type of knowledge used in "manifest reality."

So even if we now have the capacity to use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon, the problem is political/structural more than related to "knowledge" per se. How people use the technology developed is a societal problem, not a methodological one, it seems to me.

As already mentioned by others here, science was not distinguished from philosophy until the mid 19th century. Prior to that it was all more or less "moral philosophy" or "natural philosophy", more or less the humanities and science as we know them today. As for physics and philosophy, well some physicist like Sean Carroll or David Albert certainly are well informed philosophically, others like Lawrence Krauss or Neil deGrasse Tyson aren't, and usually say dumb things about philosophy.

The thing is, what we now call philosophy focuses on issues in which almost nothing is known, which is why we can talk about consciousness, language, ethics, perception, etc. The other topics in modern day philosophy haven't changed much either. So we can talk about the nature of self, free will, the ideal state, the nature of ideas, the problem of knowledge and so on. Either way, philosophy is trying to make some sense of mysteries. Physics has been lucky enough to advance to a significant degree in comparison with other sciences, that they have more than enough to deal with without having to worry about other disciplines. Yet, despite the amazing advances in physics, we still don't know what 95% of the universe is made of, even if we have a name for them in "dark energy" and "dark matter."

Another issue altogether is to ask if any science benefits from thinking philosophically about any particular issue, for example, will a neuroscientist benefit from thinking about the "mind-body problem", or would a biologist have use for, say, Schopenhauer's idea of the "will" and so on. Some might, many won't. There's just too much stuff, too much information, to uncover.

Sure. No need to discuss. Agree with most of it.

I wasn't attempting to be hostile towards anybody, I was clarifying a comment made by me that was taken as giving excuses for fascism. I was pointing out how right wingers caricature the left, which is all the time.

I agree with what you say about "garbage sites" and how only followed like 2 or 3 out of curiosity, but it's not very serious. And yes, of course the right will use any opportunity it can to make outlandish claims about anything left of center-right, essentially. As for social justice in itself, yeah, who's against it? Who doesn't want less racism, more rights for women and respect for the marginalized? Only those who stand to lose something or think they'll lose something, will be against it.

The point, as I see it, is much less about arguing with other leftists, it's to try to fix urgent issues, specifically climate change, nuclear weapons and extreme inequality. The more bickering there is about who is more left than who, or who has read Marx the best or who hates Bezos the most, is a detriment to the left, as the right tends to be highly organized when it comes to passing neoliberal policy. Now, in the US, they're having issues, we'll see how that goes.

But they've done quite well all over the world these last 4 decades organizing and passing legislation that takes power away from ordinary people into the hand of those who already have power.