“We do have faith…” becomes
“We do not have grounds to doubt…”.
Puts a bit of a negative spin on it, but if it is more precise to you it still works for me. — Fire Ologist

I almost never use the word faith. I have a "reasonable confidence" in things, not a faith. People try to use faith to describe things like crossing the road: faith that you will get to the other side. Catching a plane: faith that you will survive the flight, etc. Nonsense. These are examples of a reasonable confidence based on the real world knowledge. We can demonstrate that planes exists, we know there are pilots who are trained to fly; we know that most planes make it to their destinations. When it comes to god we don't really have this kind of knowledge. And faith is problematic since it can justify anything at all. The faith a Muslim has that Allah is the real God and Jesus a mere prophet is equal to the faith a Christian has that Jesus is god and Allah is false. I remember some racist Christian South Africans telling me that apartheid was god's will and they had this on faith. How do we determine the validity of one faith against another?

Interesting answer. Thank you.

Many thanks for the commentary, but I must say, I’m no more a fan of phenomenology than I ever was. — Mww

Would you mind saying a little about why?

Slow Horses Season One - intermittently engaging British espionage series. I was expecting more. This one was a somewhat pedestrian account of an extreme right group in Britain who kidnap a Pakistani stand up comic. Gary Oldman is ok but his lines sound contrived to make him seem more interesting than he is.

How could there be a genetic inheritance apart from the physical world? There being genes is that there is a physical world. I can't see what it is you are proposing, if it involves evolution both occurring in and bringing about, mind. — Banno

Fair enough. Someone like Kastrup would respond that genes (physicalism) is what consciousness looks like when viewed from a particular perspective. Which I’m sure you would regard as bullshit.

I’m not proposing anything in particular, just holding up what seem to be interesting arguments to me. I guess I would prefer not to propose there is no “world” at all - there seems to be something, perhaps just flux to which we provide a type of coherence.

Our shared biology and cognitive capacities provide a foundation for commonalities in perception,
— Tom Storm
...and therefore there is a shared biology that is "external" to our cognitive capacities. Biology will not work as an explanation of commonality unless there already is such a commonality - the shared world. — Banno

Don't know it that's accurate - your argument assumes that a shared biology requires a pre-existing external world. How do you rule out the possibility that biological commonalities emerge through evolutionary and developmental processes. Shared biology and cognitive capacities don't presuppose an independent "shared world" in the metaphysical sense. Couldn't they arise from genetic inheritance, environmental pressures, and social interactions?

Hoffman. Fucksake.

His argument supposes that there is no tiger, only the booming and buzzing background quantum thingy.... and yet he still runs away form the tiger. — Banno

I'm not saying I agree with Hoffman, just that there are arguments against evolution as providing a true picture of reality. A similar argument is put by Alvin Plantinga - the evolutionary argument against naturalism.

I think Hoffman will tell you that the Tiger is still a risk to human survival, just not what we think it is.

But I am not a Hoffman acolyte.

How can there be intersubjective agreement without a shared word independent of each individual's beliefs? What is it that this "language, social practices, and culture" take place in, if not a shared world? Where is that "similar cognitive apparatus" if not in the world? What is a "shared bodily structure" if not something more than the mere creation of your mind? — Banno

Just because language, social practices, and culture take place within a "shared world" does not mean this world exists independently of human minds.

Doesn't Husserl and later phenomenology argue that our sense of a common world is constituted through experience, communication, and mutual recognition - not discovered as something external.

I have some sympathy for the idea that humans create meaning and value and that these are largely contingent rather than inherent. Perhaps we live in a reality that, in itself, lacks intrinsic form or meaning; it is through our perception, interpretation, and conceptual frameworks that we impose structure upon it.

Our shared biology and cognitive capacities provide a foundation for commonalities in perception, ensuring that, despite individual differences, much of what we experience aligns. Likewise, our participation in culture and community shapes our values and collective notions of truth, reinforcing a sense of shared understanding.

That said, this does not mean that we might deny scientific and empirical truths. What it highlights is that even within objective inquiry, our engagement with the world is mediated by the frameworks we use to interpret and explain it. Science itself is a human endeavor, shaped by methodologies, paradigms, and theoretical models that evolve over time. However, this does not undermine the effectiveness of scientific practice in describing and predicting phenomena - it just shows that knowledge is always developed within a particular context.

Or something like this. I think it is stimulating to ponder these things. Not all of us are certain our world-views are correct. :wink:

With that in mind, there are three questions that I'd like answered. Firstly, how is it that there are novelties? How is it that we come across things that are unexpected? A novelty is something that was not imagined, that was not in one's "particular cognitive apparatus". If the world is a creation of the mind, whence something that is not a product of that mind?

Second, how is it that someone can be wrong? To be wrong is to have a belief that is different to how the world is, but if the world is their creation, that would require someone to create a world different to how they believe the world to be. How can we make sense of this?

Finally, How is it that if we each create the world with our particular cognitive apparatus, we happen to overwhelmingly agree as to what that construction is like? So much so that we can participate on a forum together, or buy cars made in Korea. — Banno

Are these points truly incompatible with the argument? Husserl, for one, suggests that we seem to share a world because language, social practices, and culture shape our common approaches - intersubjective agreement. Additionally, we share a similar cognitive apparatus, so why wouldn’t there be commonality in our sense-making? Why wouldn’t there also be moments of surprise when our expectations clash with new experiences?

Moreover, our shared bodily structure means that our perception of space and movement is largely similar. However, despite these commonalities, it seems that our relationship with reality is one that we construct, shaped by both our physical and intellectual limitations. What we take as "real" is not simply given but filtered, interpreted, and structured according to the constraints of our perception and cognition.

he better approach is not to mumble about a mysterious unknown, but to acknowledge that what we have is only the shared world about which we can speak and in which we act. — Banno

I agree with this and put this to Wayfarer in my response -

the notion is ineffable and so contested, so complex and difficult to approach that I am going to stick with the things I can experience directly? — Tom Storm

Why is it not plausible that organisms with sensory equipment have evolved to perceive what is there? How long would we survive if our perceptions were not mostly accurate? — Janus

Isn't the famous argument by Donald Hoffman and others that evolution does not favour seeing the world as it truly is, but rather seeing it in ways that enhance survival and reproduction.

A pity you have fallen for this. — Banno

I'm here to explore philosophical notions that may seem counterintuitive; why not? This is a philosophy forum, after all, and exploration is key. @Wayfarer ideas are deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, and while realists may disagree, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage with alternative perspectives. Speculation is part of the philosophical process, isn't it?

In fact, perhaps even Kant errs calling it 'ding an sich' ('thing in itself') because it implies identity, a thing-ness. I prefer simply the 'in itself'. — Wayfarer

Good point. The moment we use language to articulate notions of "non-ness" we're a bit lost.

Well, part of me wants to say there is. But that that world is not simply the world defined in terms of sense-experience and empiricism. — Wayfarer

How do you feel about those who might say, ok then, there may be this additional realm of 'in itself' out there but the notion is ineffable and so contested, so complex and difficult to approach that I am going to stick with the things I can experience directly?

I have sympathy for Wayfarer's account.

It does seem to be the case that our mind - our particular cognitive apparatus, with its characteristics and limitations - 'creates' the world we experience from an undifferentiated reality. We bring the world into being by apprehending it and participating in it, by having language. However, it seems to me that describing what the world might be outside of our particular viewpoint, our conceptual tools and awareness is impossible.

I think this can be a hard notion for people to grasp - it's hard enough to put into words. We're still faced with using words like 'reality' and 'world' when we mean something ineffable

Do you think that this noumena or preconceptual world might be something like an undivided whole? A major part of higher consciousness seems to be effort to go behind appearances and in some way engage with this.

The challenge for me is determining what can be usefully said about any of this and whether speculation has any real purpose. Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do is puncture our arrogance: the assumption that we truly know the world, that there is a singular reality upon which we should all agree.

Not resilient enough in my view. Trump is methodically dismantling and dissolving independent agencies and actors and replacing them with party apparatchiks and people who will swear loyalty to him over the Constitution. — Wayfarer

Do you hold the view that America will be a Christian nationalist dictatorship before the end of this year?

Do you think we all do that, or do you think rather that we all have a natural tendency to do that; a tendency which can be overcome by critical reason? — Janus

I don't know. Sure, some people change views, but then people also fall in and out of love. I'm not confident that it is reasoning that crystallises choices and values. And some people are just more obvious about their process.

Well, we are creatures of our times. — Wayfarer

I am happy to be a creature of my times, if that's what it amounts to - I quite like the times we are in. And I don't have a preferred nostalgia project myself - "things were better before we lost..." etc. This is what MAGA probably has in common with Vervaeke. We took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and need to go back. Obviously there are sophisticated and rudimentary versions of this trope.

But you do think that some worldviews are more plausible than others, no? For example, why should we think that life is inherently meaningful in some overarching way, when there is no evidence whatsoever that this is the case, and no logical reason why it should be the case? — Janus

It certainly is experienced that way by me. But critics will simply say we've inherited the godless secularism of our age. We're in that fuckin' cave, Cobber.

That said, I think there are better and worse ways to live, subject to contingent factors. If you value honesty, you probably wouldn't work in advertising, say. But such values are context dependent.

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". — Richard J Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis

I personally don't long for certainty or truth, which to me seem to be the secular version of god. I have never taken a big interest in science, but I do believe its application has achieved more than prayer or crystal channeling.

My interest in philosophy is modest, not global. I am not particularly interested in some big picture of how the human race ought to proceed. My intuitions and experience suggest that this is answerable. For me it comes down to personal relationships and experiences and what one does about them. You seem to be more interested in trying to solve a global problem via a countercultural view that the mainstream is lost in some way. I don't have that ambition. But I remain very interested in your posts here.

But that circles us back to the first difficulty: What does it mean to "have an opinion" if there is no subject to judge? — J

Good question.

Nicely written and reasoned.

As Friedrich Nietszche foresaw, this portends nihilism, the sense that the Universe is meaningless, devoid of any purpose or value save what the individual ego is able to conjure or project. It was an intuition that the great Erwin Schrödinger was well aware of:

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.⁶ — Wayfarer

I have no significant commitments to any particular perspective except that my intuition and observations suggest (to me) that life is intrinsically meaningless. But we do generate contingent value and meaning collectively and individually through experience.

But it seems to me the role of emotion is the missing piece in many discussions. We are emotional creatures. It seems to me that our reasoning and preferences are shaped by our affective relationships with the world, and we then construct post hoc rationalizations.

The things science struggles with - delight, love, joy, purpose - are, needless to say, emotions and these are in the end what "cause" us to act and hold beliefs.

It also seems to me that philosophy and other intellectual endeavours are attempts by us to reconcile our emotional lives with the way things seem to be.

Hey, you brought Nietzsche to this discussion and went on in great detail. Sorry to trigger you. Take care. :wink:

Yes. Even sooner. Given the shorter I live, the less I have to relive.
— Tom Storm

Telling us you hate your life without telling us ... — DifferentiatingEgg

Huh? I was putting this from the potential perspective of a person experiencing suicidality to highlight how your point seems to work in reverse. This is not my view.

So this is just a conversation, right? I'm not having a go at you.

But, I'm more of the mind of dedication to intellectual integrity, and by that, I clear my mind and go in to see what Nietzsche says, I consider his words with extreme care to come from the angles he sets out in his philosophy and psychology. — DifferentiatingEgg

But none of this explains why Nietzsche? Why not Camus or Aristotle? Why philosophy? What is your frame of reference for selecting this particular perspective?

No, what I said, was Nietzsche's observation on history about how the Greeks overcame idolizing the notion of suicide... overcame the wisdom of Silenus. — DifferentiatingEgg

Nietzsche's capacity to mythologise ancient Greece to serve his rhetorical purposes may not be accurate to begin with and not really have much to offer someone with real problems, right?

My question remains: so what? What does this incredibly niche and abstruse notion have to do with whether someone wants to live or not? Dealing with suicide isn’t an academic exercise in writing a paper about how art transforms nihilism. Whether the Greeks transcended despair through some balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian is unlikely to matter to someone struggling with chronic anhedonia.

the audience Nietzsche weote for was selective. — DifferentiatingEgg

Which might also be a polite way of saying that only certain sensitive or bright people understand FN - a common tactic used to dismiss criticism.

But moving away from this -

Why should someone who is suicidal care for Nietzsche - can you make that case? I am interested. And the trick here, I think, is to explain what Nietzsche does in his work that makes it useful for this application. No quotes required.

If you contemplated Nietzsche's Heaviest Burden you would want to commit suicide? — DifferentiatingEgg

Yes. Even sooner. Given the shorter I live, the less I have to relive.

But frankly, I have no good reasons to accept this frame as anything more than amusing waffle.

Also cause you suck at understanding Nietzsche doesn't mean everyone does... and Kaufmann's understanding of Nietzsche is actually altered through the incipient reification of his project to move Nietzsche away from association with the Nazi. — DifferentiatingEgg

I have no idea what a sentence like this means. Sorry.

But if I suck at understanding Nietzsche, I have that in common with multitudes. There's also a good chance it won't help others navigate suicide.

What is a single basic point of Nietzsche's philosophy? — DifferentiatingEgg

Who would know? What do they say about him -easiest to read, hardest to understand? I certainly can’t make any sense out of him - even the Kaufmann translations of Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality, Beyond Good and Evil and others. Like any writer, his charms don’t work on everyone. How does one gain a useful reading? Perhaps if you have an aptitude for his work and study him at college? I’ve read enough to know that if I were contemplating suicide and all I had was Freddy, I’d probably go finish the job.

People often imagine they have a way out of the darkness. What they imagine would work for them doesn’t necessarily work for others. I’m not sure that pissing about with slave morality and other rococo notions are of any practical use. But I could be wrong.

Nicely put.

Yes. And predictably just her saying this kind of thing is enough to have made her a target for assassination. So the idea that it's just book burning that leads to murder is not correct. Say the wrong thing, write the wrong thing and some part of this religion is likely to try to kill you.

There would have been a time when burning a Bible would result in death or torture or imprisonment in the West. We now have a religion that has grown (predominantly) tolerant - modified by modernity and consistent exposure to secular ideas.

Some of my Islamic and apostate acquaintances argue that Muslims need to be exposed to as much book burning and blasphemous drawings and scantily clad women as possible in order to wear away the layers of antediluvian thinking. I guess they are taking the Quentin Crisp view of tolerance - that it comes out of exposure and boredom.

Irshad Manji, the Islamic commentator I quoted earlier puts it like this:

Muslims need to wake up. They also need to start drinking wine, embrace any and all homoerotic tendencies, write some poetry and for the most part free themselves from the fundamentalist chains they have created (for themselves and everyone else!).The Muslim world will only be free when bars fill the streets and women show off their natural, feminine beauty. Muslims need to grow up and stop expecting everyone to be mindless sheep before a 1,400-year-old oral tradition. Nakedness will free Dar-el-Islam!

I don't know it this is the answer, but I understand the principle. Letting them remain murderous custodians of an ancient and unexamined faith is probably not going to end well either.

Misogyny and racism have been endemic to the human race throughout history. They aren't exactly a unique product of the West. They are, for instance, present in most of the classics of non-western literature to some degree. But there is also plenty of value there as well.

Anyhow, that's an incredibly broad "guilt by (loose) association" critique. You could just as well argue in favor of it because it was the dominant mode of education for the elite when slavery was abolished, universal education funded, child labor ended, and women's suffrage passed, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think my point is not unreasonable. But I am not saying a classical education leads to these things. Nor am I saying that it is merely a Western problem. I'm just saying that the idea that a classical education will improve society is not necessarily the case, given the status of classical education during periods when we were doing our worst.

Perhaps we only began to appreciate diversity and comprehend that more people were worthy of inclusion as citizens when classical education began to wane.

That said, I am not against a classical education, nor am I against the trend of people reading more "great books". I just wouldn't go mistaking it for a way out of our problems just yet. At the very least, I would prefer people to quote Homer for their parables rather than George Lucas.

Good news! — BC

Maybe. It might just amount to set dressing for a new production of right-wing authoritarianism. Remember too that classical education was king when colonisation, slavery and institutionalised misogyny and racism were key instruments of power.

To the extent you're correct that the shift towards liberal arts is really just a move toward religion, then that might be a rightward shift, but I don't consider a college program centered on the great works of Western civilization particularly consistent with a Bible based religious college. — Hanover

You may be right and I'm not agreeing with the OP per say. I'm saying that there seems to be a cultural shift and renewed interest in Western civilisation and the intellectual tradition more broadly. So perhaps there's a trickle down effect. The idea that we need to make the West great again seems to echo Make America Great Again. It seems to me that there's a plethora of nostalgia projects available, in populist and patrician flavours.

Here in Australia, Tony Abbot a former right-wing Prime Minister, even got into the act. He joined the board of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a private foundation dedicated to promoting a "new golden age" through the study of great books and Western thought. This enterprise is largely motivated by an opposition to identity politics, multiculturalism and contemporary teaching methods. This is attractive to evangelicals and other theists because it venerates tradition and respects the Bible and religion.

The issue, as I see it, is the role of the sacred and how far someone will go to defend it.

My view is that Muslims in the West should obey the laws. Killing people for apostasy or blasphemy is against our values and laws. We allow people to burn flags and holy books if that's their thing.

Are you a theist?

Do YOU believe people should be punished for burning holy books? — flannel jesus

No. But my perspective is that of a privileged, secular, decadent Westerner - the product of his times.

How can we bridge the gap between Western and Islamic perspectives?

You personally believe that? — flannel jesus

No. I am not a theist.

Your logic is impeccable.

Why punish someone for burning a quran but not punish someone for farting in public? — flannel jesus

This is the key to this entire discussion. For a devout believer, there is an enormous difference in magnitude between blasphemy and all other crimes or misdemeanours. The issue you are questioning is how can one particular brand of religion hold a book to be so sacred that its desecration would be punishable by death? The Quran is the literal, perfect, unchangeable and final revelation of God. It supersedes all other religious works and is more sacred than any human life. To burn it is to disrespect God himself. For those who don't have a notion of the sacred and the inviolable this can be hard to process.

:up: I can't deal with punk or heavy metal but I see the relevance.

It doesn’t seem surprising, given the range of hugely popular nostalgia-driven projects offered by figures like Jordan Peterson, Dr Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke. Isn’t there a recurring trope that since modernity the West has lost its way, thanks to humanism, scientism and post-Enlightenment decadence (particularly the dreaded post-modernism), and that we need to reacquaint ourselves with 'proper thinking' though the classical Western tradition and its values?

This idea also informs many commentators and podcasters, like Douglas Murray and Dennis Prager, Bishop Barron, Michael Knowles, etc, and even the MAGA movement, which is influenced by variations of this framing. Not hard to see how people are wanting to rediscover the roots of Western thinking and find their way back onto the 'correct ' road. I am assuming that this trend is often connected to conservative thinking.

Burning the Koran is a reckless provocation. Given that Islam is a religion where fundamentalism enacts and endorses violent retaliation for perceived slights and blasphemy, it's not hard to imagine the reaction.

Remember the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that republished the Danish cartoons of Mohammad? Twelve people were killed including eight journalists. For satire.

The question isn't about burning the Koran, it is about freedom of expression and to what extent any type of criticism of a religion might be taken as blasphemy punishable by death.

One of my favourite Muslim commentators, Irshad Manji thinks the West need to play a role in potential change:

I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?

I often work with politicians and bureaucrats and find the enterprise fairly disgusting. I understand the attractions of an authoritarian and technocratic state like Singapore. The streets are clean and safe. Just don’t talk about human rights. Seems to me the era of neoliberalism is ending and a new bunch of corporate elite are in charge. There guys don’t fuck around with niceties. Surprising it hasn’t come sooner. The left has become a cultural left of identity politics and has surrendered its reformist left origins. Class is dead, Rorty seemed to be onto this 30 years ago.

To see what others who are interested think and why. I said “little” interest not no interest.

Could be. It would be fair to say I take very little interest in politics,

:up: I don't know anything about US politics, I just know what I don't like. :wink:

Nick Land?

Appreciate your work, your sense of balance and fairness. Take care.

I think it’s a problematic word, yes. Does supernatural mean anything? Is the supernatural unnatural?

I think that’s a common view, but I also think that's a way to determine whether particular conscious creatures are present. I personally question the notion that if something is man made it is not “natural “.