Thank you. :up:

Out of interest, what do you think are reasonable speculations in relation to QM? Do you think it can point to idealism?

Maybe we are talking about different things. I don't always understand people, but I have empathy when people are struggling/suffering. It's automatic.

Our task could be understanding but not empathy. — javi2541997

I find empathy easier than understanding. :wink:

Mahler 10 Simon Rattle (Cooke version)
Shostakovich Symphony 5
Poulenc Organ Concerto

The nature of materialism? Or of matter? — Banno

I guess 'matter'.

This old armchair is solid, yet mostly space. And saying this is no contradiction, just a concatenation of descriptions taken from quite different circumstances. — Banno

Yeah. It makes no difference to our use of a chair or our world in general.

Of course, evolution is a cheapskate, so it gave the beetles a really crappy mate selector that was just good enough until it was foiled by the arrival of brown beer bottles — Srap Tasmaner

Donald Hoffman has a lot to answer for.

Certainly, any jump to "nothing is real" is unjustified. — Banno

Is the most you can perhaps say, 'the nature of materialism isn't what we though it was' ?

I'm not going to play at physics. I'll leave that to physicist. — Banno

Indeed. One wouldn't dream of claiming to know how to pilot a fighter jet, yet people with no expertise, are indefatigably certain about theoretical physics and reality.

I think it makes sense to avoid eating animals for the usual reasons offered. I am personally not a vegetarian but I was for a few years. My reason was I objected to the industrial slaughterhouses and the brutal system that eating meat en masse has generated. Not as concerned about a small community that raises animals and kills them as they need them. For me it seems to be partly ethical and partly aesthetic. But I lack commitment.

I read it more as a plaintive cry for calm and a veneration of the quotidian. Although, with the passing of time, the Murder She Wrote reference becomes more about nostalgia or a remembrance of simpler times.

So, while I don't think there are going to be a set of rules for this kind of meaning -- I wonder, what's up with poetic meaning? — Moliere

Would it not also follow that different types of poems work differently?

An aspect of poetry is the concentrated, careful word selection to intensify meaning. They also have to sound good when read aloud. I think it was jounro-poet Clive James who said if a poem doesn't captivate when heard, it will collapse and not be remembered. Or something like that.

Isn't that still solipsism? As I point out, whether god or my ego, only that "self" is real to itself. — 180 Proof

Maybe. I'm struggling to see it however and I'm not an idealist. I guess you're saying there is no functional difference.

So I understand solipsism to be the argument that only my mind exists and everything is 'created' by me. The second version of idealism seems to hold the idea that external reality exists, as do other minds but there is nothing but consciousness and all his part of a great mind.

You're saying that

whether god or my ego, only that "self" is real to itself. — 180 Proof

Is there not a difference... but perhaps they have similar implications. I think I need an essay on the subject. :groan:

Yep. Just noticed the SEP has this:

"Within modern philosophy there are sometimes taken to be two fundamental conceptions of idealism:

- something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and
- although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.

Idealism in sense (1) has been called “metaphysical” or “ontological idealism”, while idealism in sense (2) has been called “formal” or “epistemological idealism”. The modern paradigm of idealism in sense (1) might be considered to be George Berkeley’s “immaterialism”, according to which all that exists are ideas and the minds, less than divine or divine, that have them."

Thanks. For idealism to avoid solipsism it needs to postulate an entity like mind-at-large, Will, (or in Berkeley's case, God) - who is the guarantor of external reality, providing coherence and predictability, which present, I imagine, as the laws of physics and stable material objects. Which for me seems that most versions invoke some kind of deity or even a Paul Tillich ground-of-being style theism.

Idealism inevitably leads to solipsism. Berkley couldn't escape it and neither did Kastrup. — Darkneos

Not sure how you are getting that. Can you describe how idealism leads to solipsism? For me idealism may lead to deism or theism.

Yes, I think the simulation hypothesis is a techno-idealism for the current era. Certainly how Donald Hoffman reads to me.

I've not immersed myself in this world but would you know off hand just who are the candidates supposedly behind these notions of simulation? Is it generally some kind of organic programmer, or are we part of an endless recursion of IT simulations?

Not really. Kastrup is very clear it is not solipsism and it certainly doesn't read this way to me. But you need to read the full account. I know some people share your view, but I don't see solipsism at all - just as others can't see anything but solipsism.

The clue is in the notion of universal mind. All of reality is held by this mind and you and all beings are 'dissociated alters' of this one great cosmic consciousness. Solipsism by contrast is the argument that only you exist. For Kastrup and perhaps Schopenhauer, it would be closer to say you don't really exist, so solipsism isn't even on the table.

Are you serious or sarcastic right now? I think solipsism being true would be the end of any sort of science. — Darkneos

I think many people see in the speculative work of QM an opening for idealism (which some people interpret as solipsism).

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup says something like QM demonstrates that materialism is incoherent - all which exists is mind (consciousness), held and made coherent by a form of cosmic consciousness ( - not the god of traditional theism, closer to Schopenhauer's notion of pure will).

From his blog:

In quantum mechanics we have the idea of the wave function – Schrödinger’s equation – which is an expression of all the states that are possible, and when we take a measurement, we say that it collapses – this is a bad term, I know, but it is ubiquitous, so I shall use it – into a particular state. But a measurement is already a representation – an appearance. It is what happens when the world as it is interacts with us. What we can measure is never going to be the world as it is in itself.

So what quantum physics is telling us is that matter has no stand-alone reality. Matter is how the world appears to us when we measure it, when we interact with it, when we observe it – whatever word you prefer to use. As to what is behind that appearance, we cannot visualise it as anything material or physical because all the parameters used to exhaustively describe what we call material things are observables. The best we can know about the world as it is, is the quantum wave function, which is a statistical thing – a wave of possibilities.

This is what we have to get through our heads. Quantum mechanics has been around since the early 20th century, but we have been stubbornly refusing to accept what it is showing us. If we abandon the need to preserve the intuition that matter has a stand-alone existence, then everything that we consider a great puzzle in quantum mechanics – the great paradoxes of non-locality and indeterminacy, etc. – immediately resolve. There is no great mystery here. The mystery is our stubbornness in trying to hold on to a failed intuition.

Can anyone demonstrate that an objective morality exists 'out there' separate from human values and is waiting to be discovered?

My own view is that morality is a kind of shared (or imposed) 'agreement' about how a community or a society manages cooperation and order (and it is extremely unlikely that all citizens agree on every point). Moral values shift and change over time. Are we making progress? Are we less barbaric now than we were in 2000 BCE?

Probably. But all such judgments are dependent on perspectives and on shared values. From my perspective slavery was never right. If one holds values based on human flourishing of all people equally, then slavery can't be right subject to those values. I have no doubt that I partake in beliefs and practices that in the future will be considered abhorrent subject to different values. And it wouldn't be hard to find people now who think anyone with a petrol-driven car is a kind of miscreant.

Anything beyond this is -- any social responsibility -- is socialism; i.e., infringement on private property rights and the freedom of individuals to pursue their self interests. — Xtrix

Maybe I'm missing your point and apologies if I am.

The point, as I see it, is that corporations cannot do whatever they want already, right? They cannot peruse their self-interest where community standards are seen to be transgressed. Laws to protect community already constrain some of the worst excesses of rapacious corporate behavior. Corporations are in the community and are responsible to that community. They can't really escape this dyad no matter where you or I set the theoretical great wall between socialism and capitalism.

I wasn't aware that objective morality or god existed. :wink:

I've generally held that theists have no objective basis for morality - all they can do is express personal preferences about what they think god wants. Usually by subjectively cherry picking or interpreting scripture. Even within one religion morality is all over the place. Theists do not agree on morality.

Today, the morality of many issues is an open question. Why? Where is God? One conclusion is that God doesn’t exist or God is not all-good. — Art48

A third option. From a Christian perspective - there are commandments to follow and there are the teachings of Jesus. Humans are flawed and have free will and make bad choices. Morality is all there in your communion with God and in scripture - the fact that humans are inconsistent and weak and choose badly is a problem of people and comes with freedom.

Or, thinking outside the box, there could have been eleven commandments. — Art48

There are 613 commandments in the Hebrew Bible.

To argue corporations should conduct their business and decide what to produce based on community needs is socialism through and through. — Xtrix

Fine by me. :wink:

Bear in mind that corporations (in most countries) cannot do or produce that which defies community standards. If they wish to develop a 'white folks only' recruitment policy, they can't. If they wish to sell child porn, they can't. If they wish to dump toxic chemicals at a park next to a school they can't. So for me the question is where is that line between corporate autonomy and corporate citizenship or community responsibility? I'd like that line to be more definitive. But, no, I'm not arguing we dictate what corporations make per say, more what they can't do in making or selling it.

Could be. Just as mistakes are often the necessary path to success.

The problem is, how do you tell difference? And from what I have seen our friends are totally sincere, they just lack... wait for it...self awareness. :party: :scream:

Don't know. But I do know that memories are not recordings of experiences and seem to be reconstructed each time. I sometimes remember things which in actuality happened at a different time, happened to different people, happened elsewhere, happened in a different way, or never happened at all. I would never assume to know anything absolutely, only to a level of reasonable confidence and for many subjects not even that. I'm not looking for certainty nor absolute truth so the matter doesn't rate as a high concern.

That makes sense. Thanks.

That's not how I see people. — T Clark

Do you mind if I ask you what you mean? I am not clear how your father saw people from your account other than he tired to provide a positive work space based on an eclectic approach.

The danger with QM is that people get the physics and metaphysics all wrapped around each other. Drastically different physical principles apply to sandwiches and surfboards than apply to subatomic particles. The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale. — T Clark

That's a very well put and useful paragraph TC.

I find a lot to agree with there. I spent much of the 1980's attending New Age workshops, seminars, lectures, yoga, meditation, theosophy, Scientology, Gurdjieff Movements, Buddism, Wicca, etc. Got to know some of those folk quite well and found they were as riddled with acquisitiveness, ambition, jealousy, and anxiety as any neo-liberal, freedom loving, greed-is-good secular corporate hustlers I also knew. There were some lovely and good people there too, I should add.

I thought so and I've often wanted to ask you that.

I'm here to speak for poetry. I don't get a lot of it, but when I do, it goes somewhere really different than non-fiction or fiction. It can lead to awareness of a whole different part of who I am. — T Clark

I'm glad people like poetry and I wish I did. But I don't. You're probably right about the jazz comparison. Do you consider Tao Te Ching a work of poetic imagination?

Fortunately a great many people don't share this unfortunate view. — Pantagruel

It might be partly my fault but you're missing my point that trying to be self-aware is probably not how it is done. Witness all the obtuse and self-serving wankers who embrace self-development and awareness workshops in the New Age movement. If you're working on it, you are probably moving away from it. Tao.

Nice post.

I've always found poetry tedious. I'll just admit it. And while I loved many high romantic works of art and literature as a teen, well now I find them mostly cringy and over-wrought. — apokrisis

I hear you and agree. I also feel that way about the music.

Err, no. That's just your opinion., man. :joke: Consciousness remains elusive and thinkers far smarter than you (and me) still wrestle with the notion. But the good thing is, it doesn't matter. We still need to live, make choices, take actions, regardless of what carzy-arsed metaphysics one believes.

Sure - my definition of consciousness is - a controversial phenomenon no one can properly define or agree upon and some even suggest is an illusion. :wink:

I am presenting some questions and my sincere view of the OP. These terms are so broad and used so differently and ubiquitously that I am curious what s/he means. I have my own thoughts based on decades of reading/living, but when we ask questions here it is not always because we don't have an answer, it is to find out more from the other person.

This OP to me is far from clear. Also, I do think setting yourself a task of self-awareness is pointless. Self-awareness, like happiness, is not something you can aim for - it happens as a result of other things. Like paying attention while you live your life.

Analysis is paralysis
- J Krishnamurti New York 1974

An abusive response, Dues? You can do better.

I guess the most important part of self-awareness for me is the understanding that it is nothing special, nothing magic. It's something we do every day and something we can get better at. — T Clark

I agree with this.

My second thought is to determine a basic foundation of what we are dealing with. What is consciousness? What is self-awareness? — Universal Student

I don't understand what you mean by the question. Sure, people bark on about consciousness and awareness all the time (especially in California), but what are you specifically referring to and what are you hoping to find? Personally I don't think these sorts of questions matter very much.

Yes, I've seen this too.

:up: