Correct, but it was Descartes who was more influential, up to Newton he was considered a scientist of the highest order. Spinoza's fame was different, as far as I know.

Gassendi too and Hobbes didn't agree with Descartes. But Descartes made significant contributions to mathematics - and his view have had - and continues to have - an enormous grip on the imagination, even if we now think he is wrong.

There's scientific evidence that we are natural born dualists, very interesting literature with experiments done by Iris Berent in The Blind Storyteller, that seem to give good evidence to this view.

For good or ill (I happen to think Descartes has merits few after him have, such as attributing "common sense" - good sense - to people, that given enough evidence, nobody should be thought of as a fool and should be treated with respect), he happened to have quite horrible views on animals, but not of people, is a sad fact of the times.

BTW, I skimmed 'The Consciousness Deniers' and I could find no quotes from "the deniers" themselves which show that they actually are denying the existence of any kind of consciousness, which is telling. I'm no fan of Galen Strawson; I think his father was a much better philosopher. — Janus

You do try to defend Dennett quite a bit, I remember you telling me that he couldn't really believe that consciousness was actually an illusion, because that would make him an idiot - and he's not an idiot. But the statements are there:

“The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion."

Ok, he doesn't mean that, he means that consciousness is not what we take it to be. Then he is using the word unlike most people - including scientists - use it, so the onus is one him to give a clear definition of what he's talking about.

But they're defined in opposition to each other. Body is only extension with no thought, mind is only though with no extension. Even the human body is conceived of being like clay or earth, nothing alive about it, and the bodies of animals collections of mechanical parts. Man is different solely because of the divine gift of reason. — Wayfarer

That's right. Though a distinction is drawn as you note: the principles of body were well understood, according to Descartes and the Cartesians.

The mind was more problematic. No principles could be given that accounted for our creative aspect of language use and free will, though apparently Descartes wanted to write a book about this but never could - the Church and all.

Dennett doesn't see the mental as you and I see it, for him it is an illusions "a trick", as he says, "there's no real magic" (meaning the experience you and I, and almost everybody in the world take as self evident, as they should, is somehow magical or woo, if you like).

That's a downgrade from Descartes, because Descartes was not crazy enough to think we doubted consciousness - while Dennett does.

You mean to say Descartes' conception of body. For Descartes the mind and creativity could not be explained by materialism.

Dennett on the contrary that everything can be explained by science.

What they do share in common, I think, is that they both thought they knew enough about bodies to reach such grand conclusions.

Descartes had good reasons to posit res cogitans, and to believe he understood bodies. Dennett (and company) have no good reason to think we understand matter to a minute fraction of what they believe we actually do.

Agreed. Descartes is very often ridiculed in pop-science books, and sometimes even in philosophy. I think it's quite an ignorant view, because for one, he was highly respected at the time and for another, it's not as if were alive back then, we would have known that, say, his dualism is known to be false or that we do not believe experience to be the thing we are most certain we have.

If we assume body to be mechanistic, his metaphysics were quite sensible. But it is also true that viewing animals in such a manner intuitively looks quite grotesque.

The issue with Descartes is muddy. Many of his statements appear to show he thought of animals as mere automatons.

But there are other passages which are less clear. In a letter to his friend Mersenne, I believe he said something to the effect that he cannot know whether animals are automata or not, because we cannot see into their hearts, roughly stated.

It is true, however, that many of Descartes followers did think of animals as mere machines and participated in animal cruelty. Though barbaric to us - the reasoning they had was not completely crazy, it had some merit.

But it was also evident to others that this was insane, like Hume, for instance.

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

90 seconds to midnight. The closest it's ever been. Posted by people who are not idiots by the way. This cannot be forgotten, regardless of who one "supports".

It can tend to fade into the background given immediate deaths, but, it's a real problem.

:rofl:

I don't know man, it's kind of like sure, that's fine use cartoons if you want, no problem.

But then you have people complaining that these people need a "real flesh and blood relationship", when often porn is not made as a substitute for a relationship.

Yet if someone watches "real porn", it's exploitation - which it is - though it's not the only job that does this, by any means.

So, getting a real-life partner is the solution. I'm skeptical if this is the solution. Probably some kind of education on the topic is the best bet.

Do cars owe us anything or calculators or laptops or fans?

Until we can find a way to show that other people are actually conscious - as opposed to assuming (with good reason) that they are, I don't see the point is asking the same question to a computer.

It doesn't make sense.

The extent of usage and the nature of the porn viewed is probably of significant importance.

One cannot pretend that male horniness, especially when being a teenager or a young adult, is a very powerful force, so the market for such an audience exists in spades.

An interesting issue that arises is if it is possible to make such content showing a different side of sex which does not always reduce people (specifically women) to objects.

Murky area.

Oldboy :fire:

Better question would be why don't we make them? There are so many ways one can do something wrong (not limited to moral choices), but very few ways to make them right.

In no particular order:

Mulholland Drive
Pulp Fiction
Goodfellas
Airplane!
Oldboy (Korean version)
The Matrix
Dr. Strangelove
Lost in Translation
The Departed
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I'm surely missing some, haven't seen a good movie in ages - novels tend to be just so much more fulfilling.

There's no scientific findings published by Nature that address mind independence. This is an assumption arising from your worldview. I've said this several times now. I'm not sure why it's unclear. — frank

I'm mostly talking about physics and aspects of astronomy. Not biology or stuff that's even more complex than that. I'd say that there are parts of astronomy that are arbitrary, sure. With physics, much less so.

From what I can see, most physicist take themselves to be talking about the world irrespective of our beliefs, desires, everyday concepts and so on.

Everything else becomes much muddier and more difficult very quickly. Which doesn't render it less valuable or interesting, but arbitrariness and our ways of thinking about them do enter much more clearly, imo.

I have the same worldview you do. I'm just clearer on the arbitrariness of it than I think you might be. — frank

That's quite possible. :)

I'm saying these are epistemological differences, not ontological ones.

I'll even grant the point about the alien.

Yes. My point was just that since it's incomplete, the claim you're making isn't really about science. It's a philosophical bias that's common during the time in which you live. — frank

What? We can use the James Webb, land on the moon, calculate the age of the universe and the distance of galaxies all on the basis of the little we do know. Is this not real knowledge of the universe even if the science is incomplete?

There's weight to scientific findings. You can't really borrow that weight to say there's a mind independent world.

To some extent it's a hinge proposition that there are mind independent things, but I don't know how much of your behavior really revolves around that hinge. I don't know how differently people behaved 5000 years ago. — frank

So is there mind-independence in your view, or no? Like, do you believe all these is to the world and the universe are our thoughts about it? That's perfectly fine if it is your view.

That's true, we don't know what 95% of the universe is made of, "only" 5% of it - which, given the species we are, is still a tremendous achievement.

Since the birth of modern science, with Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes and Newton we have been on a path of ever more precise identification of the structures of the universe: planets, asteroids, starts and so on.

Since Newton at least, physics has not been wrong, it has been improved. How far will that go? We don't know. Maybe we will stay stuck where we are, given practical limitations of technology and the vast distances involved between galaxies.

But if we are in black hole, then black holes exist, absent us. Planets do too. That doesn't depend on mind, though it was discovered by it. So planets and stars, are part of the ontology of Astronomy, subject to refinement, such as the case with Pluto.

Plato would say we forget most of the Soul's wisdom when we're born. There are all sorts of alternatives. There's nothing wrong with our present worldview. It works well for us. But there's no telling what people will believe in a thousand years. — frank

If we get that far. Yes, we don't know. But we are not too far from reaching the practical limitations I mentioned.

But that we create the manifest properties, when say, we look at images of James Webb, can only leave one in utter awe, at the power of our minds and the beauty they reveal (to us) about how the universe looks to us. So yes, we know very, very little. But not nothing, I wouldn't argue.

I have in mind post-Newtonian physics. They weren't proved wrong, they were shown to be inadequate to explain certain phenomena: the orbit of Neptune and a few other oddities.

So far as we know, spacetime has not been shown to be wrong, but it has not been able to be combined with quantum theory, which has also not been shown wrong.

When I say revisions, I have more in mind what kind of stuff may lie beneath quantum theory, or what is it that combines General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.

I don't think these theories will be shown to be wrong (as was the case with Newton's theories), but obviously incomplete.

All I'm saying is that I don't think the universe depended on us for it to happen, it just is, and we manage to capture a little bit about it.

The alternative is that we created everything, including the world and that all we know are our ideas and nothing else. That's an extreme form of Berkelyianism.

So you think the stuff physics describes wouldn't exist if we were absent? That is, there would be no such thing as an age of the universe, nor would there be things we call planets (after we arise and call them this) and events that led us to our evolving?

How do we account for these facts?

Sure, I do think something existed prior to us. We know a few facts about it - not too too much, but not trivial information either.

Ok, so we have the same meaning of terms. So what's extra mental, like, if you look outside your window or go woods or something - what's extra mental in this environment?

Again, I don't know how you can know this. Two, they might be much more monocultural than us and find the diversity striking, obscene, confusing. I see no reason to rule that out. Also, there might be tendencies within sentient species and that sentient species might recognize a similar vast diversity to the one that they have in their own species.
One of the current trends in anthropology is called the ontological turn. They have realized that categories have been projected onto other cultures and that anthropogists actually need to work on their own categories much more completely because they are not able to conceptualize what they are encountering. Their categories fail, but don't seem to. There are seeds of the change in older anthropology but this issue has become central. For example the descriptions of animism have been presented in categories that match the Western models, even if they deviate from them. Anthropologists have realized that they need to, often, create new categories, more or less black box ontology to even describe the other culture's beliefs and categories. And the focus is on ontology. Not just epistemological issues of how to understand what they mean. — Bylaw

The alternative would be to say that the only intelligent species that could develop, must be like us in almost all respects - that seems to me quite unlikely.

I think the issue here is the scope of what you take ontology to be. I take ontology to be about the world - what's in the world. It's not what we take there to be in the world. Different forms of animism, or ways of thinking about time or relationships or ways to think about the identity of objects and community, are not things about the world, these are things we postulate on the world, hence epistemic. Epistemology is not limited to questions of, how do we know what we do? It also includes what we believe there is in the world, and in this respect, most of us have been quite wrong (literally wrong - not applicable to the world, but still valuable) for thousands of years.

So I take epistemology to be quite broader than issues concerning justification. And I try to make ontology about the world - this includes physics, for instance aspects of chemistry and perhaps biology. Anything beyond that would be closer to a "folk psychology" - a term I deeply dislike, because it makes it sound not serious, when it is very serious and important. Nevertheless, that's how the issue looks like to me.

I don't understand. What is extra mental, when we look at the world?

No, culture has nothing to do with my view.

Realism assumes that the world is just so, irrespective of whether or not it is observed. It may be a sound methodological assumption but it doesn't take into account the role of the observing mind in the establishment of scale, duration, perspective, and so on. — Wayfarer

I mean, there are many, many versions of realism. The realism I think holds up is something akin to Russell's "epistemic structural realism": the notion that science captures only the structures of things in the universe, without telling us about its "internal constitution", to borrow Locke's phrase. It's a view which wouldn't deviate much from Kantianism.

which we can be confident will remain just so even in the absence of an observer. But even that imagined absence is a mental construct. There is an implied viewpoint in all such calculations. — Wayfarer

I can't deny that, because it's true. It is a mental construct, but something about mathematics, mediated by mind, when applied to certain aspects of the universe, tells us something that is not mental "only". If it were mental only, we would not be able to do Astronomy or tell how old the Earth is and so forth.

This is all mediated by mind, but there are glimmers that we are seeing something extra-mental. Having a degree of confidence is the best we can do, given the circumstances.

We're used to thinking of what is real as 'out there', independent of us, separate from us, but in saying that, we don't acknowledge the fact that reality comprises the assimilation of perceptions with judgements synthesised into the experience-of-the-world. — Wayfarer

No disagreement. By saying that math tells us something about the world absent us, I'm only echoing what Russell says, which you often quote. It's because we know so little about the world that we turn to math, it's not because we know a lot about it.



No rush at all Janus, it's all a fun exercise for the sake of thinking about how you view these things, which often helps me think more clearly too. I'll reply when you finish, which needn't be today, nor tomorrow, that way we don't break up the conversation. :up:

The ontological diversity is enormous. — Bylaw

That's the thing, I think you are describing epistemic differences, not ontological ones. Differences in the way we approach our views of the world, it's not a difference in the world itself. To put is simply, take a baby from anywhere in the world - your pick: place it in the most "far removed" culture you can think of in terms of beliefs and practices from the babies original culture, and that baby will grow up with the beliefs
of the "far removed" culture.

Let the baby grow, bring it back to it's birthplace - let it stay there a few months, maybe longer, they will be able to understand the differences quite well. It may initially seem like that person is experiencing "two different worlds", but it's not literally true. If it were, we wouldn't be able to do translation, or talk to each other in different languages, for instance.

I've been fluent in my wife's language for 21 years. I live in her country. The languages are quite close. The cultures are quite close. I've worked with communciation in a diverse set of roles and have been used professionally for crosscultural communication roles also, and not just between her culture and mine, but there also.

And still we discover differences and confusions, some having to do with identity and and perception, to this day. Not the man woman stuff (though with that also), but cultural models. Throw me in with an Amazonian tribe with a still living shamanic tradition...and we'd be having to come back again and again to basic ontological investigations to undertand each other. — Bylaw

I'm not denying these things - they are big differences in terms of how we view the world, that doesn't take away from my original claim: it's all within the human species.

Since we can't know anything "above" our species, so to speak, these differences will look (and feel) like substantial differences to us, we can't help feeling that way. But a more intelligent being would look at us as if we are the same species, with minor variations in behavior.

So I think our only point of potential disagreement is one of ontology vs epistemology. I think you're claims aim to be ontological, I think they are epistemological.

intelligent symbolic creature would think in terms of identity, materiality, multiplicity, diversity, number, form, pattern, similarity, difference and so on — Janus

I don't know. I think that identity makes sense as does similarity and of course, number, but materiality or form are a bit more dubious. I don't see why a thinking being must have these specific terms: some are more plausible than others.

On the other hand nouns, for example, denote entities of various kinds, and I think that grammar reflects the logic of experience. The obvious ostensible difference is that numbers can be used to calculate, but language can also be used to deduce. Things may not be as straightforward as they seem and there's maybe a huge subject there to inquire into. — Janus

I'm not clear on that. You can say that we use nouns to loosely denote what, say, a city or a house is, or who is a teacher or a plumber - but I don't see a necessity. I don't see why, say, a city would have to be a part of the cognitive architecture of another creature. A house? Maybe - at least territory, based on examples we see here on Earth.

We can say the world consists in a multiplicity of things or in a number of things; is there a difference in the two statements? We can talk about specific numbers. I guess. — Janus

Take a look out your window, or next time you're out in a park, with plenty of trees and bushes around. Ask yourself, "how many objects are there here?" It soon becomes evident that we have a problem, we have a multiplicity of objects, but do we know how many?

Is a tree necessarily the root along with the trunk up to the stem and then the leaves? Do we count the leaves as one object or one by one? What about the branches, how many are there? I don't think you'll get a clear cut answer.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. — Janus

The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Even when we all die, that fact will remain. That's the age of the universe, before we arose (maybe new theories will change this estimate or render it obsolete).

The Sun is 93 million miles away from Earth, the distance remains a fact, irrespective of us.

Now the colour of the sun, us seeing it rising in the East and setting in the West, the warmth we feel form it, and so on, these things will not hold up, absent us.

Even the range of deities is enormous, I mean in terms of kind. You have people ridden by gods. You have cultures where assemblages and networks replace out subjects and objects and they are not the same kinds of 'things' — Bylaw

What the god(s) command may be quite different, say requiring sacrifice of some kind, maybe even murder in certain cults or we can metaphorically speak of Westen culture under the guise of the god of money.

Although the commands and rules may be different, the resultant actions and moral intuitions will be shared by all human beings. Any person can understand what it means to be exploited, even if they don't work in a factory setting.

You mention animism which is radically different from both the secular West and the religious West. You have very different ideas about causation. You have cultures where dreams are considered more real than waking life. — Bylaw

I'm not denying there are differences between cultures, and to us as a species, they do look radically different. It's kind of like when we look at a whole range of dogs, we tend to notice they are different in terms of skill, sociability, loyalty and so forth. At the end of the day though, they are dogs - one species.

A theoretically "smarter" - in terms of having more powerful cognitive capacities than we do, would look at people at consider us as we consider other creatures, we are by and large the same, but the differences we see between us, look considerable.

So the fact that some cultures take dreams to be more real than a culture which doesn't focus on dreams isn't as drastic as it looks, in my opinion.

Between human beings? Maybe, but the differences are superficial. Like some tribes may believe in an extreme form of animism, while another tribe believes in one true God. But the general themes are not too different: the good, evil, the bountiful, the beautiful and so on, with different specifications.

Between species, the differences are quite pronounced. They likely have very different ontologies, although lacking language, it would be impossible to say what form such an ontology may look like.

That other animals see things differently than us doesn't seem relevant to my point that it seems reasonable to think that any symbolic-language competent species would form concepts of multiplicity, identity and the other examples I gave. — Janus

With a sample of one, it's hard to say. Some things may be the same, others not. The identity we ascribe say, to bodies of water, or trees, could be quite different - they may conceptualize such things to encompass far more (or less) than we do. It's a reasonable possibility.

I mean, having an intelligent symbolic creature like us, possessing exactly the same cognitive framework would be pretty wild. Which doesn't imply that it would be impossible.

Why should we think that numbers must be somewhere? As to why they work so well in physics, who knows? How could we ever know the answer to a question like that? We do know that nature appears to possess quantity and multiplicity, but does that say anything about nature beyond how it appears to us? — Janus

Are they nowhere? Language is in us, that's true. Numbers too, otherwise, we wouldn't know about them. The difference here being that math applies to the nature of things - physics, chemistry and so forth - which suggests strong elements of mind independence. We can't say the same thing about language use, I don't think.

Multiplicity and numbers are different, though they have some elements in common.

As to nature, agreed: nothing beyond what it appear to us, of course. Attaching to mind independent aspects of the world, does not imply something being beyond us, it implies mind independence.

Let's take a few examples. Take a dog for instance, most of the time, they don't pass the "mirror test" of self-awareness, which implies (but does not prove) that they either lack a distinct sense of identity, or the identity they have, is rather different than ours.

Or take the example of the mantis shrimp, they have 16 light cones, as opposed to our three. This suggests they see many, many more colours than what we could even imagine. And it's hard to attribute to them, say, the same capacity of multiplicity we have. Whereas we take a tree to be one object, a mantis shrimp, lacking concepts (most likely), might see several objects.

The point is not so much that math isn't human based, it's that it attaches itself to the universe, in a way language does not - the words we use are arbitrary, the numbers we use, though we can change the symbol 3 to "III", give us the same answer.

And we don't even need to apply numbers to the universe, we can use them "by themselves" to solve a problem internal to math.

The biggest issue is, where are the numbers? And why do they work so well in physics?

Sure - to the extent you describe it, I think that's on track.

But I think we should be cautious in thinking that because they share these similarities, that they are more or less the same thing. Like a mathematician, who doesn't speak Japanese, will perfectly well understand the formula of another mathematician who is Japanese.

What math describes - to the extremely limited sense I understand this - is related to structures of rather simple things. The structure can become quite complex, but easy compared to the complexity of virtually any object in the perceived human world.

Language on the other hand, is used for all sorts of things, "communication" being one among the many things it is used for.

Then there's also the issue of representation. We represent the objects in the world in a human way, knowing of no other way to represent things.

It's not at all clear that mathematics is a representation which would significantly vary from species to species. It could, but I'd be quite skeptical.

I'm not getting notifications for your posts. Weird.

I mean, you are speaking about objects, things in the world. Mathematics is rather different, I wouldn't say it's an object in any sense of that word. I mean, where are the numbers? Nobody can point them out in the sense an ordinary object could be pointed out, or maybe even a particle or atom.

2+2 and much, much more difficult formulations are still true, absent anything else. Though of course, to make this explicit, you need a conscious agent.

I'll check that article out, thanks for sharing.

Empiricism goes out the window if empiricism is construed as implying "publicly observable phenomena". But if you include experience in empiricism, as one must, if any empiricism is going to make any sense at all, then it remains as a method of investigation.

I agree with what you say about math being independent but requiring a mind to comprehend it. Mathematics is extremely strange and may be one of the reasons why Plato required knowledge of geometry to enter his academy, aside from its timeless otherwordly nature.

But math doesn't depend on objects.

Absolutely. And that it doesn't seem to depend on the universe, somehow. Utterly baffling.

It's hard to imagine a possible world in which this wouldn't be the case, we can change the symbol "2" to "II" or something else, but it's still a mathematical fact.

Not that I take you to be saying the opposite, but, the ontology of math is pretty crazy.

Hey James, nice to see you around again! :victory:

This conception itself comes from Newton and Liebnitz' religious intuitions, but is now perhaps more associated with militant atheism than religion. The thing is, this supposes the existent of eternal Platonic laws, something that seems at odds with physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's tricky. I mean we can say that Newton and Leibniz were wrong in terms of specifics, though oddly now physics may be giving Leibniz the edge in terms of considering what constitutes the universe, Leibniz did not think atoms exist or if they did, were fundamental.

The ontology of mathematics. Can it be said that 2+2=4 was true prior to the universe and after its predicted collapse? That's difficult, but, the truth of this claim appears to be independent of the universe.

But I agree generally, that such views are at odds with mainstream physicalism.

I'm also not sure that idealism necessarily opens the door to the supernatural anymore than physicalism. There are plenty of naturalist flavors of idealism. Idealism simply entails that mentation is fundemental. The natural sciences can still be said to describe all that can be known about that mentation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You said it: "naturalist flavors" of idealism, but in general, idealism can also be used by Deepak Chopra, or some current guru-of-the-moment in India, where they seem to appear with frequency. In that respect, these idealists are liable to say incoherent things.

I don't know of any spiritualist or mystic who would call themselves a materialist.

But if you stick to naturalistic idealism, then yes, claims made would be much more sober.

Existence is just a fact of life - reasons why don't apply, in terms of looking for a justification for it. According to the evidence we have - which is quite different from the optimal evidence there may be, for creatures with a higher cognitive faculty than us - we are here because the laws or habits of the universe so happened to combine in a way that we arose.

Ethics I know not, these are so little understood, which shouldn't be surprising given that we are likely the only animals to have such a thing - there may be hints that other higher mammals have the barest of glimpses of such a phenomena. I think that it is in our best interest to take ethics seriously, given that existence is so rare in the universe - maybe unique. So we should treasure what we have, each other, and the humanist legacy.

I am liable to change some of my views, according to new evidence. In terms of epistemic-metaphysics, that's much more difficult and would need a very strong argument from dissuading me that rationalistic idealism - a la Descartes, Cudworth and Chomsky - is false. It could happen, but as of today, I think it's unlikely.

You didn't ask in your post the title of your OP. In which case, I currently think Raymond Tallis view is correct: I'm an ontological agnostic. I do not know what kind of things exist or do not exist in the world, absent the sciences, which say little on this topic. An ontology based on physics leaves an awful lot out.

Yes, I think the topic of humility is one that should be re-visited again, especially in philosophy. It's really quite remarkable he could draw such arguments so soon after Newton's legendary work.

I think his arguments are, more often than not, persuasive, sober and thoughtful. I'm going to open a discussion group to talk about 3 chapters in the book.

In any case, good idea to re-read him. :up:

It is well worth the effort, there is a treasure trove of useful and insightful stuff in it. And even in areas in which one might disagree with him, there is food for thought.

If you're stuck or need help in one section, let me know, I'm happy to help.

That took. a. long. time.

Should've been finished much sooner, but attention issues and all. Just finished Locke's Essay for a second time. Majestic and a true classic. I will forever be a fan.

Now onto Leibniz' New Essays.

As for novels, finished reading Higashino's latest novel am now reading Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend.

Wrong thread.