"...I explain only the manner in which objects affect the senses, without endeavouring to account for their real nature and operations.... my intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or explain the secret causes of their operations... I'm afraid such an enterprise in beyond the reach of human understanding, and that we can never pretend to know otherwise than by those external properties, which discover themselves to the senses."

pp.111-112 in the Penguin Edition of Humes Treatise

There are other quotes, but it would be a bit long to provide them here. The point is to state, that Hume did not think that all there was to causality is constant conjunction (this is frequently claimed, it's not true), it's that it's the only thing we can discover about it. We know not the "secret springs" of nature. — Manuel

That's significant (a great quote) and as you suggest regularly overlooked. Thanks for underscoring it.

Do people still look to Hume around the question of causation? Are we clearer or less clearer in the 21st century? I know there are are regularity theories, counterfactual theories, causal process theories, probabilistic theories, interventionist theories and others...

In order to know that you had found the right definition of reality, you would already have to know what reality is. — Banno

I know that reality is the real and the real is realty and the..... forget it..

Reality is not defined by what we perceive. We perceive stuff that is not real, and there is stuff that is real yet unperceived. — Banno

Nice. This is a point I keep coming back to in my own thinking about this.

That's exactly what science does though. Explore what we can actually know. — dimosthenis9

Do we not have to set limitations on this conceptualization of science? We need to guard against scientism. Science provides us with tentative models of reality based on the best available information we have at a given time. It shouldn't make proclamations about truth. In science things are not 'true' as such they are 'not false'. Yet.

But at least then we can say we are alive in more than merely the "technical" sense, right? — Janus

Yep.

I see metaphysics as very ordinary, but of course it would appear "lofty" compared to that all-consuming banality. — Janus

Yes, that's how I intended it. It's lofty by comparison with most current dominant worldviews.

When you wrote "journey back to life" it sounded like a metaphor for a revival/recovery/regeneration or reinvention - possibly even in a Nietzschean sense.

I am mildly obsessed with the ordinary which I insist of calling the quotidian.

There never has been and never can be any war between ideologies, methodologies or belief systems. Wars take place between factions of armed humans. — Vera Mont

They're usually fighting over resources and territory, but that's usually masked by an appeal to the superior value of one ideology, methodology or belief — Vera Mont

I doubt this is true and it seems simplistic. How would you demonstrate this?

In most cases turf, flags, resources, are all held on behalf of an ideology which usually takes itself very seriously, whether it be Islamic State or the United States.

I only presumed that they meant to communicate something to other humans. — Vera Mont

This is what I am addressing. 'Communicate something' means open ended interpretive possibilities from the author to us. Which is fine. It leads to a multiplicity of potential meanings.

My own interpretation is the only one I feel either competent or authorized to report. — Vera Mont

That's fair. So you are saying subjective interpretations of myth are all that matter? I thought you were saying there was a true version of any myth - the author's intention? If you're not saying that, then we're good to go. :wink:

Didn't someone have to tell, sing or write it first? If so, they presumably did that to communicate something to someone else. — Vera Mont

Some of the assumptions here - 1) that authors always have a specific intention and can convey it; 2) that an author doesn't want a range of interpretive possibilities; 3) that it is possible for people to arrive at a single interpretation based on a single authorial intention. None of these seem demonstrable.

And finally, whatever an author's intention, what happens is interpretation. As someone who wrote journalism for many years, I would say it's also the case that authors are not always clear in what they are saying. The finished story may not reflect the author's intention. And how do you demonstrate what the author's intention is? Again, interpretation.

as Rorty would put it, there is no truth "out there" because there really is no out there, for such an idea is a foolish metaphysics, this "original Unity". I am inclined to agree, except for one very important issue, which is metaphysics and the revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world Buddhists talk about. This is not a religious fiction. — Constance

Can you say some more on this? What is a 'revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world'? Do you see this as a possibility elsewhere - Christian/Sufi mysticism for instance?

we can argue about what is and what isn't real, but at the very least physical things, including apples, have to be considered real or the word "real" doesn't mean anything. — T Clark

I don’t disagree with your definition but is it not somewhat limited? What does it give you – the realness of quotidian objects like apples, chairs and presumably bananas?

Setting aside questions of philosophical realism, does this understanding of real not lend itself to a form of verificationism? It’s only real if you, and presumably others, can experience it as a physical object?

The big fights about what is real seem to happen in a different space – Platonism, UFO’s, the voices inside the heads of people with psychosis, demons, gods, etc.

I’m looking at a glass of water in front of me which is presumably real. Last night I dreamed of a glass of water. I picked it up, I drank from it and I put it down. It seemed real too. Until I woke up.

Myths speak for themselves, and they comment on some aspect of human thought, social development or relationships — Vera Mont

I would maintain that myths do not speak for themselves - they do not 'speak' until someone gives them a voice by deriving a meaning from them - whether that be a pauper, a professor, or the Pope. If a myth seems to comment on human life, it is because someone hearing or reading it has determined the commentary. Interpretation.

Incidentally, in relation to Christianity it is interesting how interpretation has evolved over time. The idea that the Bible can be read as some kind of positivist text is a recent one.

The contrary, literalist campaign within Christianity is actually quite recent. It developed among more or less extreme Protestants after the Reformation – largely indeed in the last century in the US. It was consciously designed as a competitor with science, providing equal certainty by comparable methods. It is thus a political phenomenon, acting in some ways like a cargo cult. It has enabled relatively poor and powerless people to use their Bibles (which the Protestant Reformers had provided) to shape a rival myth of their own. They see this as an alternative to the materialist glorification of science and technology which they have perceived – with some reason – as the oppressive creed of those in power.

- Mary Midgley

:pray: :up:

What the book says doesn't depend on their interpretation. I was referring to the book itself. — Vera Mont

And this is the entire point. The book itself is contradictory and messy, and it can't speak. There is no interpretation free account of the Bible, or any book when it comes to that. Can you point to a church or an individual who, in your judgement, has exactly the right interpretation? Even determining this would require subjective preference, surely?

Could be. I read two Holmes stories about 35 years ago. I guess I was referring to the perception of the character who Stephen Fry once described as a master of abduction...

With your inspiration, I just read "The Wasteland" too. To paraphrase Charles Montgomery Burns - I don't know poetry, but I know what I hate, and I don't hate that. — T Clark

YouTube has some good recordings of people like Alec Guinness reading it out. For me it helped get into the rhythm of Eliot.

I said that, according to the story in the Christians' reference book, evil is not caused by free will itself, but that man's suffering and free will both arise from the original sin. — Vera Mont

All this does depend on which Christian you speak too. I've met plenty of reverends, priests and nuns who do not believe in original sin and see this, and many of the Bible stories, as allegories and myths expressing a broader truth. Christians, like all religious folk, take a book and a practice and render it meaningful through subjective or intersubjective interpretations.

American Bishop John Shelby Spong (Episcopalian) put it rather well -

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.

John Shelby Spong

There never was a time when we were created perfect and fell into sin and needed to be rescued. We are evolving people; we are not fallen people. We are not a little lower than the angels. We're a little higher than the apes. It's a very different perspective.

John Shelby Spong

Well, what else can they be? — Vera Mont

Indeed but some consider them facts.

Thanks Joshs

So we parse "Quantum physics say nothing is real" as something like "According to quantum physics, it's not a real thing, it's a..."; and ask what we are to put here - fake, forgery, illusion...

We know what to put in the cases cited previously, but it is far from clear what we might put here. What this might show is that the words "real" and "unreal" have here become unmoored. They are here outside of a usable context. — Banno

That seems to be the key point for me here. The application of words where they fail us, where they no longer have utility. And Midgley's notion of 'plumbing' seems to take a similar approach to conceptual schemes which are pushed beyond their limits and create confusion.

I'm referring to the journey back to life, from out of the endarkenment of propositional discourse. The journey from analysis to poetry, from logic to metaphor.

People search for ideas that may bring them to life because they feel the cold grasp of the grave, and the absurd killing viciousness of greed, resentment and corruption that rules human 'life' beneath the veneer of 'civilization'. Your "supermarket" and "shopping" metaphors say it all; they speak to the intolerable banality of modern human "consumer" life. Of course (for the "lucky" ones) it is also warm, cosy, safe and secure, and it is just there that the problem lies. — Janus

Nicely put and intriguing. 'Journey back to life' is particularly juicy stuff.

Those metaphors, by the way, are not how I generally see the world. They were chosen for their brutalist effect (a la Weber to which you probably allude) in contrast to all this lofty talk about metaphysics.

Can you say more about the journey back to life? It sounds a little like a 'paradise lost' narrative. Does it relate to Buddhist metaphysics? Are you suggesting that Buddhism might be a kind of antidote to the present era of capitalism, scientism and managerialism?

Sounds reasonable. It's been an interesting thread.

what we mean by "real" and "reality" only has meaning in relation to everyday human experience. — T Clark

Pretty sure I still subscribe to this version too.

But the aim
of Will to Power is a self-overcoming that delights in moving through endless value systems. The only growth here is a kind of self-diversification. — Joshs

That's interesting. Is 'delights' something FN would recognize? What would moving though endless value systems be like? Sounds exhausting.

It was just a cheap shot. It's what I have in the absence of original thought.

If anyone thinks I'm wrong or should leave this kind of analysis to actual military people, please say so. I just find this topic interesting and have no background in tactics or anything. — ToothyMaw

Well, we have uneducated and untheorized experts here on quantum mechanics, neuroscience, psychiatry, political theory and all sorts of other subjects, so don't let it stop you. :wink:

Making up new words when there are already perfectly good ones is one of the reasons people don't take philosophy seriously. — T Clark

Tell that to Heidegger...

Have you changed your thinking in any way about 'real' as a result of this thread?

It would be interesting to understand what people get from this book. I have tried to read it (Kaufmann translation) several times but find it histrionic and dull. A friend of mine who is a great enthusiast of Nietzsche and this book in particular, is always talking about self-overcoming, which is curious since he is pathologically incapable of changing even the simplest aspect of his own mostly unhappy life.

To put it quite plainly, the practical benefit of such a pursuit is simply the reduction of anxiety, existential and others sorts. The ‘cessation of suffering’ that the Buddha promises is a fat carrot that religious types find irresistible . — praxis

I suspect this is largely true. I spent a lot of time on the periphery of a Buddhist society in my city in the 1980's. I was surprised to find that its members were as riddled with anxiety, ambition, status seeking, in fighting and general BS as any other group of people. One of the monks would regularly polish off a bottle of whiskey in the evenings and complain about life. Buddhism seemingly had minimal transformative value. My partner used to joke, "You should have seen them before.'

:ok:

Yes. You can take him in his proper context as the god of a patriarchal tribe of herdsmen in the middle east of 1500BCE. They had a rough living to make among other rough peoples; they sure could not afford a genteel god. — Vera Mont

This is true where god is fiction and just an enlargement of human tendencies, a wish fulfillment fantasy with all the sins of its creators, hence, genocide, rape, slavery as part of the divine plan. :wink: The result is a god, which like humans, is perfectly compatible with evil and tyranny.

But I don't think that a Buddhist psychiatrist will be of the kind I mentioned, although this is not impossible. We are talking about "numbers", not individual cases. And I talked mainly about massive human abuse. And of course, for godssake, I didn't say that all or even most psychiatrists, of any religion or no religion, are of the kind I mentioned. I believe they are the minority. — Alkis Piskas

Thanks for the clarification.

I get that. I was curious what you got out of it. What difference does it make to you? We spend a lot of time here talking about abstractions and the experiences of generic humans.

But the spiritual techniques are designed to take us beyond language and to effect transformation of consciousness. — Janus

What do you mean here; are you referring to the gradual journey towards enlightenment/liberation, or something more prosaic?

The world is an unfathomably large supermarket of ideas and lifestyles. I am curious 1) why people go shopping and 2) why they put certain items in their shopping cart. :wink:

Religion should not look necessarily like that. E.g. Buddhism doesn't. — Alkis Piskas

Plenty of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists draw from Buddhism or are Buddhists. Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein springs to mind.

I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts.. — Janus

This may well all be the case. What however... and I ask this genuinely... is the point of this kind of frame? Can you share how this might be of use to you in life?

Always struck me that the God of the Bible is a fascist prick who behaves like a mob boss, so he most definitely could have created evil. He's on the wrong side of most social outrages, from genocide and rape through to slavery. And then he turns out to be a child abuser, sending his own son to be stung up like a criminal in some frankly stupefying blood sacrifice - a bizarre atonement ritual he might have managed in a totally different and peaceable fashion. Then there's hell... Can we really take Yahweh as anything but violent, petulant and egomaniacal?

But theists would much rather give up on logic than god, so the replies will be - have been - shall we say unphilosophical? — Banno

Usually they scream 'free will' at you like so many overwrought Randian neophytes.

As I see it, the whole affair comes to one thing, and that is a reduction of the world's interpretative possibilities to the original intuitive givenness: Nunc stans. A pure phenomenology. — Constance

Thanks. I have no sensus divinitatis, so it's mostly just word games to me. :wink:

I enjoy reading you, it'd be easier for this old fart. :wink:

Hard to follow your posts. Why not highlight the sentences you wish to quote? The word "Quote" appears and you click on that word. The quote will appear in your text. Then we can all see where the quote ends and you begin. :wink:

There's no other medical field or profession that has been so much accused for human abuse as psychiatry. — Alkis Piskas

Priests spring to mind. How do you feel about Catholic priests who are also psychiatrists?

Interesting. Are you a practicing Buddhist?

Entanglement here is a descriptive feature of being attached to things in the world, like sex and ice cream. — Constance

Yes, that's what I was referring to. Not QM. Also I was thinking about Bitbol's connection with phenomenology, not his QM work. But I hear you. I probably should have referenced Evan Thompson rather than Bitbol.

I think you can talk about anything. there is nothing in language that stops this. Ineffability is about there being no shared experiences, not about the failure of a concept to grasp an experience, for concepts don't do this. — Constance

Hmmm. Don't disagree but I'm not sure I follow why you say this. You originally said this.

Liberation does not "speak" and it is not anything that can be spoken; but then, this is true, really, of all things, isn't it? Look around the room and there are chairs, and rugs and walls, etc. — Constance

I'm afraid your arguments are passing me by - perhaps it's my lack of philosophy.

My understanding of ineffability is that for all the talking we do, the truth about some things is beyond words.

But perhaps we can stop here, I'm not sure any of this matters. Nice talking to you. :smile:

But this seems to bypass the essential idea, which is really quite simple. The meditative act is very simple; the interpretation brings in the complexity, for people have questions that are extraneous to this one simple notion: liberation. But, one has to ask, liberated from what. This IS the extraneous question. Liberation itself answers this question, but does so do not by issuing text after text of dialectic superfluity. The abhidhamma was written for instruction and understanding, but the assumptions about what this understanding is are really quite foreign to general thinking. This is because liberation is about something wholly Other than general thinking, and to talk about it, one has to step away from it and enter into the historical and cultural mentality, where everything is entangled with everything else.

Liberation does not "speak" and it is not anything that can be spoken; but then, this is true, really, of all things, isn't it? Look around the room and there are chairs, and rugs and walls, etc. But these are interpretative events, the seeing and understanding that things are such and such this or that. These are contextualized knowledge claims played out in the understanding. Liberation in the profound Eastern sense puts these events on hold, thereby terminating world determining events. — Constance

This seems to be a lengthy way of stating 'you can't put this into words' - which is one of the standard message of ineffability inherent in most religious traditions. Sure. As someone outside of Buddhism (or phenomenology) this construction of 'liberation' sounds much like an appeal to faith.

The world is what makes suffering because it is complicated; that is, suffering is so entangled in our affairs and we not think of these as suffering at all. Value is an entangled concept. Buddhists say retract from these essentially social and pragmatic constructs, and this gets down to the, call it the pure meditative act: — Constance

Are you suggesting that liberation is not a value or an entangled concept? Incidentally, are you a Buddhist, or are you working to 'connect' Buddhist principles to phenomenology or both, like Michel Bitbol?