I took what I think is the majority view. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

The majority view is the view that prevailed later on. It's not the one the earliest Christians held, most likely.

But also pleasantly surprised with those who simply see it as a short-hand or derivative of social arrangements. — StreetlightX

Social arrangements can and have denied people rights, which doesn't make sense if it's just a shorthand. At best, you get a relativism between social arrangements, where we can say slavery denied rights according to our modern arrangement, but not at the time.

Which makes the abolitionist case difficult, unless we just say they preferred a different arrangement. But they thought they were making a moral argument, which is people shouldn't be treated like cattle, regardless of what society says.

Strictly speaking natural rights seem to depend on the needs and wants of the people who make them up. — VagabondSpectre

That can be used to justify slavery or any form of oppression. The issue is that the needs and wants of the people who make them up are not necessarily the same needs and wants of other people.

That might be historically true, but if we want natural rights to be something more than what those in power need and want, then it to ought to apply to everyone. For example, because you're human, you should have the right to determine your own life, and not be the property of someone else. And thus slavery was a violation of natural rights, no matter how the people at the time, or any time, rationalized it.

Maybe Jesus and the Jewish sect he belonged to believed Yahweh was the son of El Elyon. Judaism wasn't a monolith back then as there were different sects. Nor had it always been strictly monotheistic. The angels were sons of God Most High, and each nation had its own god, Yahweh being Israel's. But that fell out favor at some point when Yahweh and El were merged into the one God of Judaism.

However, that doesn't mean some Jews didn't still hold on to the older beliefs. We have the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Qumran community. 1st Enoch is very much into angels, and Enoch is transformed into the angel Metatron after he ascends through the heavens. Here we learn that the sons of God who had children with the daughters of men prior to the flood were the Watcher angels.

In the Jewish-Christian Ascension of Isaiah, Jesus descends from the seventh heaven, taking on the form of an angel for each heaven before becoming human.

And here's an interesting quote from Paul:

5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, [and] being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. — Philippians 2:6-11

So Jesus preexisted as the "form of God", which could be understood as a begotten son of the Most High (Father). Note that Paul mentions those who are in heaven. That would include the other angels. But Yahweh is the special or chosen angel. Maybe the highest and firstborn Archangel through whom God created the cosmos. That would also make Yahweh the Logos of Philo and the Gospel of John, which could be linked to the ancient divine Wisdom tradition.

Yahweh also was had a secret name, and was often referred to by The Name. Christians thought that was Jesus.

Sure. And on the other hand, does it seem that Trump is driven by the welfare of his voter base? — Pantagruel

No, but luckily Trump is held in check by other branches of government and the Constitution. Despite all his bluster, he can only do so much.

And one could argue his voter base gets what they voted for.

In fact, America could dramatically increase its overall productivity...if it limited the number of people who are allowed to work.

EVERYONE should be provided with "enough"...and "enough" should be defined as the kind of life one could live if earning $50,000 to $60,000 per year. — Frank Apisa

Sounds fantastic, but can this be afforded? $50K times the number of adults in the US (rounded down to 200 million) is 10 trillion dollars.

The second part of this is that you're paying people not to work, unless they want to. Question is whether the economy can be productive enough to support the taxation needed to provide everyone with that $50-60K a year.

see prioritizing social welfare - establishing a baseline of core human values that supersede monetization - as the focus. Freedom can take care of itself as long as we start to take care of each other. — Pantagruel

One could argue the various communist countries have attempted this approach, and have noticeably failed on the freedom front. I'm skeptical that freedom can take care of itself, because there are always those would like to have power, or deny it to others. That's why rights have to be explicitly protected.

the exercise of force and coordination of power are the conditions of, and not constraints upon, the exercise of freedom. — StreetlightX

Sounds like doublespeak without specifying what sort of exercise and coordination, and why it's necessary. Any group in power is going to be exercising force and coordinating their power. It's how they rule. But what sort of exercise and coordination results in a free society?

I'm guessing anarchists will disagree with this, and libertarians will limit it to a minimum of protecting rights. For the rest of us, what does this mean?

There is no comparable evidence of Jesus. — Ciceronianus the White

That's true, but Paul wrote as if Jesus was a real person in the 50s AD, and he mentions meeting with Peter and James, Jesus's brother. Mythicists argue that Paul was referring to a divine being, not an earthly human, and that James was only Jesus's brother in the faith. But there was the Jurasalem sect who survived for centuries, known as the Ebionites. They considered Jesus to be a regular human being who was also chosen by God to be the Jewish messiah, and taught his followers to obey all of the Torah. And that is traced back to James and Peter.

We know from Paul's legitimate letters in the NT (seven of them), and the writer of Acts, that Paul had disputes with the Jurasalem Church over whether Gentile converts had to be circumcised and some other issues related to following the law.

Josephus also wrote about John the Baptist, and there's evidence from the Gospels that Jesus was probably a disciple of his at one point.

I think the existence of the Ebionites makes it harder to believe the mythicist account, where Jesus starts off as an archangel crucified in the firmament by demons, since it's pretty clear they didn't believe that. My guess is that there was a real Jesus of which a little bit can be known from Paul and the Gospels, but there was also Son of Man myth that he was combined with dating back to the Qumran writings, like the Book of Enoch. Or Paul imported Philo's Platonic teachings into his revealed gospel, since he didn't know Jesus while he was alive. Or a combination of all three and maybe more elements. Religion is syncretic and it evolves over time. There are usually different sects fighting over the true faith.

It's also important to note that the Ebionites considered Paul to be a first rank heretic.

Not to my knowledge. But I'm not sure that absence of evidence in this case can be taken to provide evidence of absence. — jkg20

Reminds of that interesting NY Times article a few years back about how philosophers in general have failed to take the latter Wittgenstein's arguments seriously enough. Whether he was right or wrong, his position warranted serious investigation.

I'll admit that I tend to dismiss him out of hand because I just can't believe that substantial philosophical arguments are mostly just language on holiday.

That's true. My question is have there been substantial philosophical debates settled by demonstrating that the issue was a misuse of language? Certainly some people have been convinced this is the case, at least for some issues. But shouldn't that be logically provable for everyone? Or is that also a matter of linguistic debate?

I'm sure Dennett or Chalmers or whoever have made mistakes in their arguments, and misused words. But that doesn't mean the issue itself is resolved. If it is, I'd be curious to see examples.

@Luke,@Snakes Alive,@jkg20
Let's take an example from a real life incident that remains a mystery. The Dyatlov Pass is where nine Russian ski-hikers died during a 1959 winter trek in the Ural mountains. There are 70 some theories, and bunch of books on Amazon you can read on the case. The original investigation concluded that some unknown compelling force was responsible. The lead investigator, interviewed decades later, said that "fire orbs" were involved, but the higher ups wanted to shut down the investigation.

Something real did happen to those hikers. But the evidence is insufficient to decide which theory proposed so far, or even category of theory, is correct. So the debate continues on for those who remain interested, like with Jack the Ripper or other famous unsolved cases.

So what does that have to do with philosophy? It's an example where the ongoing debate is not one of language, and it won't be solved by analyzing terms used in the debate.

don't think so. There could well be systematic reasons why some conceptual disputes cant get cleared up, because we lack the cognitive ability to understand — Snakes Alive

Cognitive closure is one possibility that McGinn has put forward for difficult philosophical problems. But it's not a very popular position, because it smacks of "mysterianism", and if you can ask a question, you should have the means to answer it, in principle. A dog doesn't understand relativity because it can't grasp the concepts. A dog can't even ask questions about it. Or so the counter argument goes.

In any case you seem to allow that analysis of language use can be a useful tool at least at the beginning of a debate. — Snakes Alive

Sure, I'm not saying it's not useful or not important to philosophy. I'm expressing my skepticism that most philosophical debates are really about language misuse, and thus can be resolved by proper linguistic analysis. Or at least not the long-standing metaphysical ones, because those have been expressed in so many ways across cultures and different languages. You would think that if the realism/idealism debate was fundamentally a language mistake, then somebody would have pointed that out long ago, dissolving the matter.

But if a tool can be used, it can be used well or badly. I'm not saying this is the case, but perhaps Chalmers and Dennett did not use those tools effectively at the outset. The only way we could ascertain that they did or did not, would be to go back to what they say and apply those tools once again. — jkg20

But popular debates usually have a long history with people coming at them from many different angles. We could go back and say, well Chalmers messed up here using that terminology, and Dennett failed to understand the argument there, and so on. But what about Nagel, Frank, etc? They all present their own arguments and starting points.

Well, consensus amongst dissenting parties doesn't guarantee anything and some of the most well known philsophers are renowned for changing their minds after many years. — jkg20

If there can't even be a consensus on whether getting clear about language resolves philosophical disputes, then why suppose it does?

Well, I would start by asking both Chalmers and Dennett what they mean by "qualia", after all, clever as they undoubtedly are, they are not immune to conceptual confusion and this might be revealed when we push them to express what they mean. — jkg20

If it were just the two of them creating a new thread on here, sure. But it's been an ongoing debate among many philosophers for several decades now. So if it were just a conceptual confusion, you would think someone would have pointed that out by now, and all the rest of the philosophers engaged in the debate would have been like, "Oh yeah! How did I not see that? Moving along ...".

But that doesn't happen. So either Witty diagnosed some really deep and difficult problem with philosophy. One that's hard to root out. Or his approach doesn't work for long standing and well known disputes, because maybe they're about something more than proper use of language.

The thing is that it's not like professional philosophers don't know about Wittgenstein, or Carnap or Sextus. And the other thing is that determining how correct Witty was depends, at least in part, on analyzing his language use. And there is some disagreement over that.

But maybe philosophers are just a cursed lot who love to argue.

Well, your position is not too far away from Wittgenstein's then. He was pretty clear that once you make the questions you are asking clear, either they will turn out to be addressable by science, or they will rest philosophical ones. — jkg20

Alright, that sounds reasonable. But let's take the hard problem debate. It's not known whether science can resolve it. Philosophers like Chalmers argue science can't. Sow here does that leave the debate? Should we dismiss it as meaningless? But what if I find it meaningful and understand what's being argued? I know where Dennett and Chalmers disagree, and it's not over the meaning of qualia. It's over whether qualia exist.

No, it makes the debate dependent on them. — Luke

Sure, in a sense you're right. But in another, this is missing the point, because debates are usually about things and not the words themselves. Or at least they start out that way.

Which is ironic, because we're now debating word usage. Which seems to happen too often in these philosophical disputes. But let's agree. Debates depend on word usage. Okay, so how does that answer the realism/idealism question?

Because if I want to know whether the world is ideal or real, defining the terms doesn't answer the question. It just leaves a puzzle.

But pehaps your point is that philosophy itself is futile. — jkg20

I think it's worth being able to explore the questions raised. Humans are prone to wax philosophical anyway. But maybe finding resolution is a matter for science, where science can provide answers. At least we're not still stuck with the five elements of Aristotle or ancient atomism.

Even though we have to use it? — Luke

We also have to use our bodies. Does that make the world dependent on our hands, eyes, brains? Then again, this is philosophy and Berkeley thought things were dependent on being perceived.

I would say no, science shows us the world doesn't depend on us. QM and Covid-19 don't care what words we use.

But surely "debates such as realism/idealism" do "depend on our language usage". If we are going to debate e.g. "the nature of the world", then we have to do it using language, no? — Luke

If we're going to debate anything, we have to use language. That doesn't mean the thing being debated is dependent on language. Analyzing the language usage of "social distance" and "flattening the curve" isn't going to tell us how long to continue to doing both, for example. That's a matter for the epidemiology of Covid-19 and health care capacity balanced against economic concerns.

Nor would analyzing he terminology of QM tell us the proper interpretation for the measurement problem. It would only help us understand what's being debated.

However, you might have a more restrictive notion of what it would take to resolve a philosophical issue than I do. You may even have a more restrictive notion of what counts as a philosophical issue in the first place. — jkg20

My notion is that it a consensus can be reached by professional philosophers. Ongoing debate tells me a consensus has not been reached regarding many issues, and so the last century of analyzing language has failed to be as successful as originally intended.

Wrong to us, yes. But this itself assumes some correspondence theory of truth about something "out there." — Xtrix

You don't need correspondence for realism to be the case. Deflation is another option. But setting aside the question of realism, ancient cosmology has been shown to be wrong epistemologically, without making any assumptions about what science tells us regarding the nature of reality.

It's no different than the flat earth people, except the ancient people didn't have the as good of evidence to work out that the world was round (and yet some did manage to do so). And the world being spherical (roughly) is something verifiable.

On the other hand, all action and investigation is conducted on the basis of tacit meanings -- otherwise it'd be a matter of pure instinct. — Xtrix

The point is that debating meanings does not resolve debates such as realism/idealism, because the nature of the world does not depend on our language usage. Nor does our ability to know, for that matter.

Right, in that case it was "consistent with the universe" too. — Xtrix

But it wasn't. Their cosmology was wrong.

That alone makes examining how words are used a useful activity for philosophers to engage in. — jkg20

I haven't seen that it's been very successful in resolving philosophical issues.

"Consistent with our universe" is meaningless. Maybe it implies some correspondence idea of knowledge, I don't know. — Xtrix

It is meaningful when you take into account the cosmology of the ancients who believed in those deities compared to cosmology today. Yahweh literally sat on a throne positioned above the visible stars, which were angels. Heaven was located in outer space. The earth had corners and the sky was held up by pillars, with a firmament that separated the water above from the Earth below. Hell, or Sheol, was a literal cavern in the ground where the dead went to wait.

The supernatural or spiritual realm wasn't some separate other plane of existence. It was part of the same cosmos.

They don't exist? Do numbers exist? Depends on the meaning of "existence" -- which is a word, with various meanings. Guess that matters. — Xtrix

I'm not interested in substituting discussions of philosophical issues for debating semantics. If that's what philosophy amounted to, then it would be a sub-discipline of linguistics.

Sure, if we're going to debate the existence of numbers, it's helpful to state what that means and what's being argued. But to insist that the debate is over the definition of existence, numbers or math is to misunderstand the argument.

Regardless, your claim was that words and word usage doesn't matter. That's still completely wrong.. — Xtrix

It matters for how we say things and what we mean. It doesn't matter a lick for what is the case.

That's just not true. If it were so easy as simply being a "matter of what kind of world we live in," then we'd all still believe in Ishtar and Yhw and a geocentric universe. — Xtrix

We wouldn't because they don't exist and aren't consistent with our universe, but the kind of world we live in is no simple matter to figure out. That's why we had those crazy beliefs, and it's why philosophy kind of started with skepticism.

If I understand Wittgenstein correctly (and I might not), then it is not the subjective experience of dreaming that determines the meaning of the word. Obviously, we are all taught how to use language, including words such as 'pain', 'dream', and 'remember', by others who cannot access one's private sensations. This all relates to Wittgenstein's remarks on the misguided notion of a private language. — Luke

But It has to play a role because we talk about our subjective experiences. It would be absurd to relate my dream to you if my dream played no role in the language game, because then what the hell would I be talking about and how could you understand it?

But maybe I misunderstand the private language argument.

What's the problem, exactly? Someone has to tell us what "consciousness" is. Likewise with "God's existence." Why is that not a "hard problem"? It certainly was for centuries, but that essentially drifted away. — Xtrix

It was for centuries when monotheistic religions dominated culture, but now that people are free to argue against God's existence, and there are lots of good arguments at least calling it into question, the problem is not hard for non-believers.

Consciousness is a different matter because we all see colors, feel pains, hear sounds, etc. But those don't form the scientific theories we use to understand the world and the workings of our own bodies.

In neither case is it a matter of definition or word usage. It's rather a matter of what kind of world we live in.

But as I've pointed out elsewhere, the very notion of subject/object, "inner and outer worlds," mind and body, etc., already presume an understanding of what it is to be. They themselves operate in the context of an ontology. In the West, at least, that ontology is still very much Greek. Until we understand this point fully, we're operating in a blind alley.

(This is not to say these problems don't exist, or that they're "wrong," by the way.) — Xtrix

This is a good point, but the problems still exist even if you reframe the debate, as you mentioned in parentheses. It doesn't make the fundamental issues with perception, consciousness and language go away.

It's true that I'm part of the world, not a mind ontologically separated from it. But that doesn't mean my experience of the world is some unfiltered omniscient window onto things as they are such that I can dismiss philosophical concerns over knowledge and what exists.

It's too bad The Great Whatever and Landru Guide Us no longer post here as they were two of the premier defenders of idealism and would have had something to say to all the rock kicking going on in this thread. I notice that Wayfarer doesn't even bother anymore. There was another prominent idealist whose name I forget.

That being said, I agree that ontological idealism is false, and tried desperately to argue against their positions in the past when it seemed idealism was the leading metaphysics of the forum at the time. But the scales have decisively tipped in the other direction since their departure.

So to even it just slightly, a problem for metaphysical realism is that it's prone to skepticism, which the simulation and BIV arguments demonstrate. If it's possible the world of perception is somehow an illusion, then idealism is less easy to dismiss. And really it goes back to the ancient problem of perception all the way up to the modern debate over consciousness, with stops along the way at Descartes, Hume, Kant and the more recent indirect/direct realism debate.

This is the point of the conditional, that if the word has a use in these people's language, then the word "beetle" would not be the name of a thing and this thing does not belong to the language game at all. The word would not be used to refer to anything in particular, but would only refer generally to whatever is in a box, which could include nothing. As Wittgenstein says: "The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something" — Luke

The obvious rejoinder to this is dreams. Our own dreams are the equivalent to a beetle in a box as nobody else can experience a dream we have. And yet we can easily communicate dreams we remember to other people.

So how does that work? People do legitimately dream and they do legitimately talk and write about dreams remembered. We can't check their accuracy. But we can certainly understand what is being related, more or less.

And dreams are certainly private. Yes, we have tools today to tell when people are dreaming, more or less. But we can't tell what the content of their dreams are. Maybe someday dreams will be read out by some sophisticated scanner and machine learning software, and posted on Youtube for everyone to see. It won't be exactly the same as having the dream (the original emotions and feeling of the dream is exclusive to the dreamer), but we will at least get to watch them.

But until then, they are beetles in a box of our sleep.

If reality has no common natures,.why should numbers share a nature necessarily? — Gregory

Their universality, if they have a mind-independent existence. I'm pretty sure numbers being real would entail that nominalism is false. Maybe there aren't tree universals, but three of anything would be the same exact number.

According to the eternal inflation model, which I tentatively accept as the best science we have at the moment, nothing caused the universe to expand initially because there is no initiation, runaway expansion has always been the normal state of the universe going back potentially forever. The big bang was a random temporary slowdown of a small part of it, which became our known universe, which has been slowly accelerating back up ever since and will someday resume that runaway expansion like everything else beyond it. — Pfhorrest

So there's an infinite inflation where a finite part had a temporary slowdown?

I'm not very satisfied with that idea. I'm not even sure what it could mean. At what point during the infinite inflation was there a temporary slowdown?

I have a problem with real infinites, so maybe that's it. Infinity sounds like a concept humans created, not an actual quantity of something existing. I thought that if you end up with infinities in physics, that was an indication that something went wrong.

It seems to me the entire question of "why is there something rather than nothing" is just a result of a mistake in our reasoning. We tend to subconsciously reify categories and relational terms into ontological "things". In this case, we turned relative absence into it's own absolute thing "nothingness". — Echarmion

But you can just change the wording to ask, "Why does anything exist"? Which doesn't need to reference some ontological nothing.

Questions (and answers) are not separable from semantics. — Janus

Rearranging words to answer a question either shows the answer to be trivially true or it isn't a meaningful answer. It's just a word game.

Compare that to asking questions about cosmology. You don't rearrange words to find an answer.

Because there can be. — Pfhorrest

But why?

Forget about modal realism; there couldn't have been nothing simply because nothing cannot be; it's a contradiction in terms. — Janus

That's just semantics though. We don't need to talk about nothing existing. The question is why anything exists.

If modal realism is true, then the “innate potential for reality to exist” just consists of the trivial fact that there is no possible world at which there is no world, i.e. at every possible world there is some world, so some world or another existing is not only possible, but necessary. There couldn’t have been nothing. — Pfhorrest

Then the question becomes why does the innate potential for reality exist? Why are there possible worlds?