LLMs now routinely write clear and flowing prose. — Jamal

Interesting. I wonder then why the job applications written to me are all so terrible, full of clunky locutions that few people would actually use. Applicants need to edit the stuff they rip off so that it actually works as a coherent job application.

I think, given the dangers of AI, and the ways in which prominent members of this site have used it to make themselves look smarter than they really are, that its use should be banned altogether on this site. — Janus

Interesting, I haven’t noticed particularly. But I avoid reading lengthy and didactic posts which are often poorly written. The AI stuff I’ve seen often seems peculiarly worded and difficult to read.

Or maybe you see authoritarianism everywhere?
— Tom Storm

Then I wouldn't see it at all, as there'd be nothing to contrast it against. If everything is orange, you can't tell it's orange. — baker

Well, I’m not convinced that you don’t see orange everywhere. But let's not speak in code; my point is you tend to frame most ideas in a negative light, with a focus on what you see as abuses of power. And when others have a different perspective, you seem to need to paint them as wrong or deluded. An example is when you responded to my point with:

Oh? Or maybe you fail to notice their authoritarianism? — baker

You may not have been going for smug or patronising, but it could be read this way.

So given your response above about seeing "orange" I could use the same device. If I can identify authoritarianism, then presumably I can identify when it isn't there too.

But none of this really matters, right?

Do you think it is impossible for a Christian preacher to be non-authoritarian in their approach?

Authoritarianism is when your dad punches you in the face if you steal your neighbor's bike (even though no one saw you). Totalitarianism is when you're a masterless slave, toiling in a quarry for eating an apple that fell off a passing truc — Astorre

What? Are you going for hyperbole and farce here? I don’t know about your dad, but it’s perfectly possible to be an authoritarian parent without violence. And this definition of totalitarianism seems way off the mark. Why did you choose these examples?

A totalitarian parent or government would be one that seeks control over every aspect of a child’s/person's life; use of time, interests, friends, and who uses guilt and emotional manipulation to gain total submission.

An authoritarian parent represents a somewhat milder version of this, emphasizing discipline, order, and compliance. Authoritarian approaches exist on a continuum, and some may even involve the use of violence.

This resonates perfectly with Kierkegaard: Faith is a personal act. Faith is silent. — Astorre

Isn't Kierkegaard just another person with a view on faith? I'm interested in why this matters. This point, and the accompanying paradox, seem important to you, but it doesn't resonate with me. So I'm curious about the gap

Are you a Christian?

Oh? Or maybe you fail to notice their authoritarianism? — baker

Oh? Or maybe you see authoritarianism everywhere?

Sorry, the idea doesn't resonate with me. The better preachers I’ve seen make no demands and simply promote contemplative living, in harmony with others, often using scripture as allegorical stories. It’s about generating a conversation about value and eschewing dogma.

But I concede it isn't hard to find monstrous literalists - they are out there too.

But as I said, there are myriad types of preaching. Isn’t it simply meant to awaken others? It’s not necessarily prescriptive or certain.

I’ve never encountered preachers who say, ‘You must do X.’ I would imagine those are fairly simple types. You may be referring to the Fundamentalist Preacher’s Dilemma. I don’t take fundamentalism seriously as a form of credible spirituality. And I say this as a nihilist... :wink:

Faith and preaching are distinct acts; I don’t see how expressing the latter necessarily betrays the former.

Please share: do you see the "preacher's paradox" or do you think it doesn't exist? — Astorre

No, I don't think it matters.

I suspect there are as many types of preachers as there are faiths so I don't think we can readily say " the preacher is x". I’ve known my share of priests, rabbis, elders, reverends, preachers, and cult leaders. I wouldn’t say they have much in common, apart from a desire to reach others. But some want to do it through dogma or authority, while others aim to promote individualised faith or pluralism through empathy and contemplation. Religious faith plays no role in my life, but for those it does, it’s personal, intimate, and often ineffable. The connection between personal faith and preaching is often more tenuous than you’d think. I once spoke with an Anglican minister who had delivered an extremely definitive sermon, and afterward, when I asked him about his apparent certainty, he admitted he was riddled by doubt and felt he’d made mistakes in both tone and content. Preaching is performance while faith is introspection.

He asserts: I want others to be saved, too. After all, is it wrong to wish for others to be saved? — Astorre

The “salvation cult” sounds more evangelical than Christianity per se. Liberal churches that do not follow Fundamentalist dogama generally do not emphasize this. I got through ten years of Baptist Christianity with almost no mention of any need to be saved.

Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop John Shelby Spong puts it like this:

True religion is not about possessing the truth. No religion does that. It is rather an invitation into a journey that leads one toward the mystery of God. Idolatry is religion pretending that it has all the answers.

I can't talk to philosophy or religion.

Gratitude, for me, is largely ineffable. It’s a blend of feelings; mostly an intuition that things could be otherwise, and therefore a recognition of the value in the comforts, strengths and control one (or a community) does have. Alongside this comes a feeling of good fortune and thankfulness, and perhaps, a quiet sense of relief.

I think it's also shaped by people I've known who constantly complained about not having enough, of all things being subpar and then eventually ended up sick, dying, or broke, only to learn the hard way that they had actually had it 'good' all along. Gratitude can often be a state of comparison.

I partake in no religious or philosophical practice, although we all undoubtedly absorb elements of these through culture. I am frequently grateful: for clean water, heating, food, for living without earthquakes, fires, floods, for my (so far) robust physical health, and for any material comforts I have. In this I include other people and my nation. I don’t take too much for granted and can readily see how one's situation can swiftly deteriorate. This gratitude was perhaps shaped by my upbringing: my parents survived the Nazi menace, and I heard stories growing up. No doubt everyone has their own view on what constitutes proper gratitude, and whether any form of spirituality or thought system needs to be part of its expression. I tend to think that leisure and some comfort can be necessary for some of us to feel gratitude. However, I have also heard gratitude expressed by marginalized groups, such as those experiencing homelessness.

I heard pollsters Tony Barry and Kos Samaras speak at a conference I attended the other day. Samaras' view was that the Liberals are doomed for the foreseeable future if they continue to borrow from the Howard playbook or flirt with Trump-style posturing. Law and order and anti-migration are on the nose, The voter demographic is now much younger, and compulsory voting pushes the discourse toward the centre and probably toward smaller parties offering more nuanced responses to social issues. Samaras argued that voters here are receptive to complexity and disdainful of the simplistic simplifications of populists.

Not keen on thought experiments, they seem too abstract and disconnected from real-life situations to be useful to me.

Morality, as I understand it, is a contingent code of conduct. I would settle on the option that kills fewer people. The problem, of course, is that the person you kill may well be a brain surgeon, while the ones who live could be three scumbags. I don't theorise much about morality, I act intuitively.

If our reason represents us to be intrinsically morally valuable, it is telling us that our moral value supervenes on some of our essential properties — Clarendon

I don’t have a background in philosophy, but I’m wondering on what grounds we would say that we possess intrinsic moral value? What exactly is intrinsic moral value?

Liberalism has all sorts of definitions. — Leontiskos

Yes, I think that's fair. I'm unsure what counts as liberalism these days. I always thought it was a bit of a continuum.

One of the central problems with liberalism is the incoherence of its neutrality principle. Liberalism claims that it is a neutral, universal, tradition-independent framework, when in fact it is one particular, non-neutral tradition among others. The liberal state envisions itself as a kind of referee who oversees the game but does not interfere on behalf of any side and has no value-commitments of its own. It is perhaps the only political philosophy which pretends that it is itself neutral; which pretends that it utilizes no metanarrative in ordering narratives. — Leontiskos

Sure. But what’s the best alternative to liberalism? Which countries do you believe operate on pure principles of liberalism, and what should they replace this with?

Thanks. I read The Magus back in the 1980's and have no memory of it. I'll have another look.

I don't see how it's possible to deny that there is order in the universe, regardless of humans perceiving it. If solid H2O sometimes floated in liquid H2O, and sometimes didn't… If photons sometimes traveled at 299,792,458 mps, and sometimes didn't… If electrons sometimes repelled each other, and sometimes didn't…. if the strength of gravity sometimes followed the inverse square law, and sometimes didn't... On and on and on and on and on... It would be chaos if those things didn't always work the same way under the same conditions. The universe would be chaos. If a universe could exist at all. — Patterner

I understand why it feels compelling to say that the universe must have order, because without consistent laws, nothing could exist as we know it. Maybe you (and most scientists) are right about this. :razz: Neverthless, I am curious, does what we call ‘order’ exist independently of our own frameworks? The stability of H₂O, photons, electrons, or gravity is only meaningful within the systems of concepts, practices, and distinctions that we impose.

Does the universe possess order as an intrinsic property, or does it only become ordered through our acts of knowing, as we impose structure on an otherwise indeterminate reality? Your notion of chaos, therefore, is not an external threat; it is simply the indeterminate reality that we continually structure in order to make sense of anything at all. The predictability we observe is real, but is this because we have stabilized certain patterns within an otherwise indeterminate world? I wonder if what we call ‘laws of nature’ are our codified ways of structuring reality, not independent features of the universe. But I fear I have strayed into an unpopular and perhaps debased version of post-modernism.

But let's look at an example of the above so we can tease it out.

When we say that water freezes at 0 °C, it seems like an objective fact about the universe. But from my perspective, this predictability arises perhaps because we have structured reality with concepts like temperature, phase, and measurement. The water itself doesn’t carry the law of freezing; it only behaves in ways we can recognize once we impose these distinctions. What we call a ‘law of nature’ is therefore not an independent feature of the universe, but a pattern we have stabilized within an otherwise indeterminate reality.

I'm just trying to think through this stuff here and perhaps doing it badly.

There is meaning, and there is order. We find those things. — Patterner

Got ya. The view I have sympathy for at present is that meaning and order are products of our interactions with the world rather than features waiting to be uncovered. We create concepts, patterns, and “laws” as tools to navigate our experience. This makes me wonder, what would count as meaning that is independent or external to human thought?

But I can see how it would be argued that the daily sunrise or even the laws of logic are external to us. I’m not entirely convinced, and I wonder to what extent the universe we know is a contingent product, not of some external truths, but of our cognitive apparatus. Similar, I suppose, to Kant’s notion that space and time are necessary conditions for any experience: they structure how we, as humans, perceive the world, rather than being properties of the world independent of us. But this is just an intuition, and I don’t know enough philosophy to turn this into a more comprehensive picture. And as someone pragmatically inclined, reality as it might really be doesn't much matter.

Certainly, among my top 5 books of all time. — Manuel

What are the other 4?

Why is that? — Patterner

You agree with this? I imagine it’s for facilitating survival and attempting to manage our environment. Making the wrong choice can harm or kill us. But it’s obviously more nuanced than my couple of sentences.

The invitation in your OP was to consider how we use the word"cause", and you showed that causal chains and inferring probabilistic causes are quite different ways of speaking.
— Banno

That's what I was trying to do. I don't think I've been very successful. — T Clark

I don’t have much to add here, but I’ve enjoyed your OP and think you raise some significantly interesting ideas as Banno has summarised. The notion of cause has interested me for some time. My initial interest was in how the idea of cause applies to historical events (which is terribly fraught, slightly different and more nebulous to the matters you have raised). We know there is an impulse in human beings to make meaning and wrest order out of chaos, and central to this is being able to identify first principles.

Kinda reminds me why Buddha never answered questions on what is "reality" and such because it didn't really matter. I kinda like his stance. — Darkneos

Well, that's mostly my position too, for the most part, but more as someone who also has sympathies for pragmatism. But I remain curious and open to most arguments.

As for consciousness, strong evidence points to a neuroscientific basis. Doesn't matter if you guys talk about it often on this site, doesn't make it accurate. — Darkneos

Nothing anyone says here is necessarily accurate. I have no firm view on consciousness, as I am not an expert. This matter is far from settled, and a couple of assholes on the internet are unlikely to solve it.

When you say something is a standard view you're implying a degree of popularity, even the context of your post showed as such. — Darkneos

No, I’m saying that a particular view is simply on the menu. If you can’t tell the difference between a statement that contextualizes an idea within philosophical discourse and an ad populum argument, then we’ve got bigger problems than the nature of reality.. :wink:

There is a difference between "we don't directly engage with reality" and "reality cannot be known". Again science it a strong argument that we don't have to directly engage with it to know it (which would explain why it's findings frequently go against our intuitions). — Darkneos

This I do largely agree with.

It never claims to have perfect knowledge of the world and acknowledges it could all be wrong, but we currently don't have a better method for understanding reality, and this one is working really well. Shockingly IMO. — Darkneos

I don't disagree with this either and have made the same point elsewhere on the forum. Which is why I have tended to describe myself as a methodological naturalist and not a metaphysical naturalist.

sounds like a looney thing to think, especially since embodied cognition has fallen out of favor due to it's flaws (and evidence against it). — Darkneos

It’s very much part of the current thinking of writers like Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, and Shaun Gallagher. What evidence do you have that it has fallen out of favour? I don’t think it was ever “in favour” as such, just part of the philosophical menu. The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson has been a significant topic of discussion on this site for a few years.

There is a difference between "we don't directly engage with reality" and "reality cannot be known". — Darkneos

Indeed and I am unsure what reality is meant to be and whether it can be known. Which is not the same thing as saying it cannot be known.

What is reality?

RadicalJoe I’m guessing the above isn’t quite what you were trying to inspire? :joke: — Fire Ologist

Ha! Was I too rude?

I did say this also

I don't radically disagree with much — Tom Storm

Sorry if I came across as rude. I guess I took the invitation for honest feedback somewhat robustly.

:up: I don’t have a shortage of answers to this myself - I’m asking what the OP had in mind.

It's not ad populum fallacy, also you're the one who claimed it first by saying it's a standard view yet when I say it's not suddenly it's a fallacy. Though I would argue philosophy is a popularity constest. — Darkneos

I said it's an orthodox philosophical view that reality can't be fully known. I'm not saying this to imply it's popular, but rather to point out that it's an established position for us to contend with. It's on the philosophical "menu" and not, as you seem to think, something that is automatically ridiculous just because science seems to work.

Anyway, we seem to be talking past each other. Take care.

These ideas are not much different from the inclusive homilies that make up the value statements of so many not-for-profit organizations. I don't radically disagree with much however they seem to be a standard issue progressive position.

If I were being critical I'd question following:

This is the heart beat Mother Earth needs to hear and feel. — RadicalJoe

What the hell is 'Mother Earth'? Why use this anthropomorphism? It's not something I would personally relate to. I find this cloying and sentimental.

By being better human beings today we choose to invest in a better world for tomorrow. — RadicalJoe

What is your idea of a better human being? The Nazis and the Communists all had their notions of this, so it's almost without shape until it's carefully articulated.

Empathy? What about those without it? You can't tell someone without something to have it. I guess the assumption here would be that we all have universal empathy and that in some way this is essential to the human. I'm not convinced.

Helping each other, our shared humanity, is what truly defines who we are. — RadicalJoe

Well mass murder and war are also venerable and central to the human. Your view is a communitarian position, have you read any Michael Sandel? He takes this sentiment, refines it, and puts a bow on top.

Many people who take a secular position put the flourishing of conscious creatures as central and argue that as a social species humans have an incentive to respect each other. Reciprocal altruism.

Celebrate diversity as a strength that enriches our deeper collective consciousness. By accepting and embracing our differences, we fuel our collective strengths and struggles. — RadicalJoe

Can you say how?

But that is what is meant especially since it started with "The external world that cannot be know" by their own words. Your assessment is still incorrect. — Darkneos

It's interesting how you consistently interpret this wrongly. To say that the external world cannot be known is by no means the same as saying there is no external world. And I am not committed to either. I am stating that I have sympathy for a constructivist view, which resonates with other philosophical schools.

It's actually a minority position among philosophers. — Darkneos

That's an ad populum fallacy. Philosophy is not a popularity contest.

Kant merely said that we don't directly perceive it. Heidegger was kinda nutty on that end. — Darkneos

I am also saying that I have sympathy for the view that reality is a human construct an act of embodied cognition and that we don't experience it directly.

More or less it's a position you have to accept to get anywhere in philosophy otherwise you're dead in the water. — Darkneos

You're dead in the water until you learn to read others with more care.

But given the success of science it could be reasonable to say we do directly make contact with it. — Darkneos

That's just amusing. A kind of naïve scientistic or materialistic position worthy of a Dawkins. There are many arguments against this notion. Let's just take one of them: the very success of science itself depends on models, abstractions, and instruments that mediate our experience. What we have are theoretical constructs and measurements, not unfiltered access to reality.

Postmodernists would go further and argue that 'success' is a socially constructed standard: science’s predictive power doesn’t show us reality as it is, but only that our current frameworks work within the language games and practices we’ve built. In other words, science is one way of making sense of the world, not a privileged window into some mind-independent truth.

Of course, you might ask, who cares what the postmodernists say? And anyone can use that approach to dismiss any school of thought that doesn’t please us.

t is, especially since it doesn't seem like they understand what they are saying with "External world" in air quotes. Suggesting it cannot be known means there is nothing to be a part of since it's all in your mind.

External world and reality means there is a world to be a part of that does not depend on you for its existence. I feel that much should be obvious to gather from what I'm saying. — Darkneos

See the comment, perhaps, more in the tradition of phenomenology or a more constructivist orientation, for which I have sympathy. It does not match your interpretation that there is "nothing and it's all in the mind".

I do not think it is clear that humans make direct contact with a world external or transcendent to our interactions and cognition, which is a perfectly standard philosophical position, whether you are talking about Kant, Heidegger, or the more prosaic Hilary Lawson. To quote the lesser known philosopher, Norman Bates, "We're all in our private traps."

It's self refuting if you think about it. Like if there is no "External world" that kinda renders philosophy moot. — Darkneos

I don't think that's the right reading of his post. See last post.

But right there you point to the core dynamic that organises society - a balance between competition and cooperation - and then shrug your shoulders and say there seems to be no natural order in the way humans collectively organise. — apokrisis

I'm not saying this is the natural order. I'd say it applies to the West (and certainly in my patch) and it's the contingent product of capitalism and culture. My Aboriginal friends here tell me that this process isn’t a part of First Nations culture. I suspect that the Western hegemonic tradition may have inflicted this on most of the planet today, but I wouldn’t call this a natural order any more than I would say that about the dominance of neoliberalism.

What I do think most humans do is look for regularities and patterns. But to what extent these are features of reality or products of our cognition is, for me, still an open question.

And yet maths tells us that even chaos is a structured pattern. — apokrisis

I’m not sure we can treat apparent structure as anything other than contingent, it may simply reflect the methods we use to measure and make sense of the world. Since I’m not a mathematical Platonist, I’m open to the idea that mathematics is created rather than discovered, and so the structures and patterns we observe may tell us more about how we construct our experience than about any inherent order in what we assume to be reality. But this is still an unsettled matter, and I’m about as close to being an expert as Donald Trump is to being a statesman.

But I mean, in our models of the world, we only have to be right for all practical purposes. We don't need to know everything to know enough. — apokrisis

Yep. And we don’t even need to know "true" things to make successful interventions in the world. for instance, the Aristotelian–Ptolemaic model imagined an Earth-centred universe with planets and stars fixed on rotating celestial spheres. Although utterly wrong today, it successfully predicted celestial motions, eclipses, and calendars for centuries. It also provided a successful aid to navigation by allowing predictions of star positions

But what happens when the greenie and the developer meet to discuss their mutual prejudices? Doesn't the frustration soon rise to the point where each must assert their dominance in terms of some moral absolutism?

Or don't you talk to developers much. What do you make of a spectacle like Trump telling the UN that climate change is the world's biggest hoax? — apokrisis

As it happens, I work in an organization that collaborates with government and corporations, and I’ve been involved in development in modest ways. I also know developers and how they operate. Often cunts by my standards.

As for your example, every position can be framed with a set of narratives designed to persuade others in one direction or another. Usually, money ends up being the deciding factor, but not always. Community organizing, lobbying, advocacy, and education can achieve remarkable results. Still, I’m always aware that my cause is just one of many competing values in a world where most things are ultimately for sale. And in the end, what we are really talking about is human behaviour, a product of culture and language and not some “true” order of nature. Or something like this.

My preferred interpretation of W's statement is that the fly bottle is something the fly has contrived and by which it mistakenly thinks of itself as apart from the rest of the world instead of a part of the world. So, showing it the way out would include correcting misconceptions, e.g. the belief in an "external world" which can't truly be known, mind/body and other dualisms. The fly bottle is self-imposed. — Ciceronianus

I like this.

I’ve been swayed by advertisements many times, most people I know have. Bought plenty of things I didn’t need. I’ve also been convinced to do things by compelling rhetoric - it’s not magic, just how people behave. But I lack the disposition for debate and so I will leave you unmoved. :wink:

Thank you for this thoughtful response. Lots to think about.

Reality is dichotomies all the way down. Not turtles. — apokrisis

I always thought it was contingencies all the way down. :razz: But then, I’m not a philosopher, so I can afford to think what I do (for now), which is that so called reality is inaccessible, and all we can know are constructs, some of which work for our purposes, some do not. And perhaps that’s enough: to navigate life by the models that seem to work (at least for a time), without pretending we’ve ever touched some "essence" beyond us. Is this what you are hinting at below?

So causality is foundational. It is always just our idea of reality. And yet also, one has a reality to check things with. Once you understand this is the game, the rest is just working out the details to the point you find a good reason to care. — apokrisis

This is enticing. Can you expand on the latter part of this para?

Do humans need to do this for everyday living? Almost universally they prove that they can get by without any measurable degree of logical or mathematical or experimental rigour.

They can just see trees and mountains and imagine instead how much better things would look with as a flattened plaza with some public artwork and this year's version of fashionably blocky buildings. Even beauty can have its necessary other. Be determined by the eye of a beholder. Be considered as a celebration of all things civilised and well-machined. — apokrisis

I wonder if this is unfair. Certainly there are examples of this. But there are also plenty of folk who don’t care about philosophy and just see mountains and trees and want to preserve and nurture such things.
The impulse to destroy or "redevelop" is not a necessary byproduct of our ontology.

Yes. But so often the fly is comfortable where it is. — Banno

You joke, but I think this is fair. I like my bottle, it's home. In a similar way, why leave Plato’s cave when there’s a permanent puppet show and everything is warm and predictable? And we know the sun causes cancer...

Yeah, I guess it comes down to a difference in worldview or disposition. There’s not much point in debating it and I’m a poor debater.

It's also worth noting that the argument is not that all hate speech causes violence - another rhetorical ploy being used here. It's more about the othering that is central to hate speech, together with the issue of the culpability of the speaker in subsequent violence. — Banno

That seems important here. The way people are spoken to and described by others shapes how they see themselves, how valued they feel and how they are seen and understood within a culture, and can even legitimize certain kinds of treatment by others. Consider those who are homeless, so often described in public discourse as “deros,” “junkies,” or subhuman monsters. Much easier to have them killed or carted away somewhere if they don't qualify as citizens. It seems strange to think that language has no power or effect on behavior. Why would we have advertising, prayer, speeches or Fox News if language was powerless?

But not everything is living and embodied in Nature. You need a model of causality that is large enough to even hopefully account for the reason why a Cosmos would exist. And one that goes beyond flowery words to have mathematical and quantifiable consequences.

Co-emergence is a better way to think about this rather than via a constraint/freedom dichotomy.
— Joshs

But the argument is that freedoms and constraints co-emerge. In logic, that is what being a dichotomy means. That which is formed by being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. — apokrisis

Interesting. This isn’t my area, so all I can do is ask naive questions. Are you saying Josh’s view is mistaken, or just a partial account? I’m also curious, in light of the first quote above, are you any kind of theist or idealist, or is your position purely rooted in a scientific model of reality? Do you see causality as foundational for how we understand the universe? I can never tell with questions like this; is it something baked into reality, or, like Kant’s time and space, is it something built into human cognition?