I'll have to get back to you in a bit, I'm currently reading Brian Davies' introduction to philosophy of religion. As of now I will say that contemporary theistic personalists see classical theistic conceptions of God as incorrect, usually based upon Scriptures, although there are some theological arguments brought up.

So far as I know, the only reason why you would look conscious to me is that you would look alive to me. If you could explain why and how the two are in fact ontically disconnected in the fashion you appear to presume, then I might think the OP had a better actual point. — apokrisis

You'll have to give me the essential characteristics of "life", then. As far as I can tell, anything lacking a nervous system cannot have a mind.

Unless you're going for some sort of panpsychism or idealism.

So my thoughts on this are that, since mind appears to be so wholly different than ordinary material objects and processes, it is unlikely that it just suddenly "appeared" as if it were an alien to an otherwise material universe. Instead, mind, or at least a derivation of it, would have always been, either in the monism of idealism or the transcendental idealism of Kant and co.

Then there's also the question as to what purpose consciousness actually serves to an organism. Presumably everything necessary to survive could have been done without the use of subjectivity. Why pain, when you could have algae? Why city-scapes, when you could have moss? Why philosophy, when you could have shrubbery? The purposeless-ness of the universe must be taken into account here, then. A decisive, yet accidental, mutation in genetic information created an organism that accidentally happened to live alongside more simple organisms. Complexity was not necessary, yet there was nothing preventing it from happening either. The rise of complex, sentient creatures was entirely unnecessary and accidental, not inevitable, but happened anyway thanks to goldylocks luck.

Evidently we can, for example, when we talk about the mind, and share insights into the minds of different speakers. Therefore, the mind is not isolated. — jkop

This is merely communication and inference. There's a reason behaviorism was so popular back in the day: mind is literally cut off from observation and thus it was seen as unfit for scientific inquiry.

OK. That's your claim. Now make sense of it causally. What is the mechanism that underpins your categorical distinction? — apokrisis

The point of the OP was that the phenomenological experience of being a black box is in friction with a universe that is seemingly open to observation, and vice versa. I have no idea how this came to be. But the fact is that I cannot see your mind and you cannot see mine.

If you can quickly say why life and mind are different in ways that make sense, we're good. — apokrisis

Mind is of life, but life is not mind. It is not a requirement for life to be mind.

ou can freely choose to pursue God’s love or you can freely choose to ignore his promptings and continue wallowing in a state of permanent isolation. He is not going to coerce anyone into loving him. — lambda

I feel like that itself is a form of coercion. Either pick a nice relationship or lonely isolation. God, if he exists, has incentivized our actions.

For the umpteenth time, not all physicalists are eliminative materialists. — Terrapin Station

Right. It's just that if they aren't eliminative materialists, then the definition of material or physical has to be stretched.

So is there a difference between life and mind in your book? Is one "just physics" and the other "something else"? Or does life start the swerve away from the brutely material. Is it a good philosophical place to start looking for the answers you seek? — apokrisis

I don't know what you're saying here.

What you don't seem to get is that it is merely an opinion (a not very helpful one at that) and that others may be of an entirely different opinion. — John

The problem I have with this and presumably Schop1 has with this is that we have reasons to hold this opinion, whereas we see those who disagree with us as having very little in terms of actual reasons to support their disagreement.

Simply saying "I disagree" is unhelpful. Much too often do people mistake actual disagreement with not liking the consequences of an otherwise fine argument.

Spinoza does not posit an "infinity of substances" but on the contrary argues that there can be only one. — John

Sorry, I meant an infinity of modes.

I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with eugenics as long as everyone participating in it is doing do voluntarily, per their own goals with it. — Terrapin Station

So like what's going on right now?

Personally I would attack the notion that the purpose of human life is the achieve happiness. Happiness is one of the most insidious myths of modern society.

Well, my point was that the outcome of antinatalism is not going to be realized anytime soon — schopenhauer1

Not with that attitude. Though I suppose we are pessimists.

We exist to entropify with slave-like efficiency.

So this idea of us having a 'life', is wrong. We merely exist presently. Time is not some linear objective thing which our present travels along. How time works is mentally we (presently) project a past behind us, and a future before us, the present being a movement. It's an illusion that there's an 'overall' time. And so there can't be an overall life which we have or lead. Essentially all there is, is what's presently being experienced. — dukkha

This strikes me as potentially incoherent. At first you deny that the past or future exist, yet then go on to say the present is a movement, or a process. Yet you can't have movement or process without a start and a finish, i.e. past and future.

What is actually happening, then, is that the past maintains its existence superficially by memory, and the future instantiates itself by teleology.

The actual outcome of antinatalism really has no great significance. It is rather the symbolic implication of what procreation stands for. — schopenhauer1

Whaaaa? The most common motivation for antinatalism is that life isn't worth it due to an unreasonable amount of suffering. The goal of antinatalism is to minimize this suffering, because suffering is bad and what is bad is what ought to be removed, eliminated, or prevented, like a cancerous tumor.

Other motivations for antinatalism are far too poetic and reserved to be taken seriously in light of what suffering is actually like.

Procreation is not about procreation necessarily, but about us and our reason for doing anything. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, it is how we achieve immortality, or the next-best alternative at least. Socrates or Plato (can't remember) understood this, so did Mainlander when he criticized Schopenhauer.

What about just "I am suffering, therefore suicide."

Seems perfectly logical. Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck. — dukkha

Fuck the red pill/blue pill debate. The former are a bunch of degenerate scumbags and the latter suffer an inferiority complex. Reality ain't that binary, and both groups are extreme and attempt to impose a universal sexual law upon society. I neither want to be a douche nor do I want to be a whiny bitch.

What's so great about non-existence? That you don't suffer? Existence must be quite horrible if you actually see non-existence as good for you, considering you aren't even you when you don't exist. You're a fiction when you don't exist.

The various experiences we have, extrapolated into good/bad valence, are reasons for and reasons against living life.

That doesn't sound like Tolstoy (who was a Christian) at all. Can you cite a source for that? — John

Here ya go. A Confession, by Tolstoy.

olstoy affirms that the lives of 'milliards' of people show him that all these rational categories of despair-in-life are mistaken, and that their example shows him that life has meaning through faith - though he then goes on to criticise the Church hierarchy too. — mcdoodle

Right, similar to how Sartre had characters who were deeply pessimistic but he himself may not have been.

It's the ultimate option we might have to decide freely upon our own faith and vica versa, being aware of this option might actually negate suffering seeing it can be used to willingly undergo certain circumstances instead of feeling like a slave to circumstances. — Gooseone

Exactly. The prospect of suicide keeps us sober and present.

Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck. — dukkha

Indeed this seemed to be the perspective of Tolstoy, who thought there were roughly four types of people:

1.) Those who were ignorant of their existential condition

2.) Those who understand their existential condition but focus on pursuing pleasure (hedonism)

3.) Those who understand their existential condition and also understand that hedonism will not give meaning or purpose to life and so kill themselves (he calls these people the "strong")

4.) Those who understand their existential condition and also understand that hedonism will not give meaning or purpose to life, but are unable to kill themselves (the "weak")

This also seemed to have been the perspective of Sartre, or at least one of his characters, when he said that every person is an accident that dies suddenly and persists out of weakness.

Sometimes I agree with Tolstoy (possibly Sartre). Other times I would like to continue to experience whatever it is that I am experiencing.

Life is not a sequence of arithmetic pleasures and pains. The existence of moods effectively disqualifies deprivationalism or any similarly crude axiological calculus.

What seems to be reasonable is to always have suicide available as an option as a means of grounding one's decisions and outlook on life. It's easy to get carried away in a stream of good fortune and forget the underlying mechanisms of life. Good fortune, of course, is good, but having an exit available in case this does not last or shit hits the fan is, in my opinion, only rational. It means to take control of one's life. If you burn a meal in the oven on accident, you don't force yourself to eat it. You throw it away. It's only rational - i.e. in our best interests.

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Probably why Tolstoy called those successful in suicide the "strong" - they were able to exit life without any present strenuous or horrible experiences, but merely the thought of the possibility of horror.

You can think of eugenics as extended care, for the future of humanity as well as for the afflicted. — Ovaloid

It's gene-worship, basically.

Why do people need to be born into the world in order to redeem it? — schopenhauer1

I'm not sure if your representation of various world religions is accurate. Abrahamic religions all see the world as "fallen" because of sin, and that we must "escape" and leave behind this problematic world and obtain salvation in Heaven with Yahweh. And Buddhism recognizes that life is suffering, and that we have to escape the cycle of rebirth in order to free ourselves (and others in the case of bodhisattvas) from the perpetual suffering. It's not about redeeming the world, it's about escaping the world, solving our problems, and seeking resolutions elsewhere.

Nietzsche criticized Christian morality for being slave-like, and specifically in this case for essentially saying that we ought to give birth to people in order to help them. This is quite poignant, I think. Just go to any Christian charity or apologetics website and you'll see this. They see themselves as doing to work of God, and see the uplifting of those in need as the highest good. In other words, it would seem as though the Good is obtained by cleaning up the mess. But apparently you can't save people if they never exist. So the whole process of saving people becomes important in-itself. Christian morality has the tendency then to see life as machine of goodness. The more people there are, the more people need saving, and saving is good. It is apparently a good thing to put people into a shitty situation in order to help get them out of the situation you put them in. It certainly feels good to help people... This is quite obviously "slave-like", in that the objectively shitty conditions of the "slaves" are twisted around to be seen as something to be cherished. A classic example of a coping mechanism - when no alternatives are apparent, twist reality to be more suitable to your tastes. However it seems pretty obvious to me that if they had an alternative to enduring a life of suffering, most would take it. If there was a way to get to Heaven without the help of Jesus, we'd all take it. But, alas, there isn't another way into Heaven - or so we are told.

Now, the Buddhist appropriation of birth, from my understanding (though don't quote me on this), and perhaps only within the higher-up levels of the religion, is that birth is actually an act of saving those from a worse existence (like an animal in the wild). If you don't have children, they will go on to be a wild animal in the wild and suffer even more. Re-birth is inevitable if you do not achieve nirvana. Not having children won't do anything. Karma literally is a bitch. At least that's what I understand it to be.

But in my opinion, "meaning" in the existential sense of purpose and justice is an imperfect coping mechanism; a hodge-podge method of ESCAPING (again! :( ) our condition by establishing a reason why things are happening the way they are and what our position is in the going-ons; a way of REASSURING ourselves that we are important (SELF-ESTEEM). Any sort of existentialist philosophy must then be powerful enough to ACTUALLY WORK but simultaneously flexible enough to JUSTIFY ITSELF as an AUTHENTIC way of life (and not just a coping mechanism). The absence of any such way leads one to extreme pessimism as panic, fear and meaninglessness solidify themselves, at least until one finds a suitable way to distract themselves.

I feel independent from my body, as if I could exist without it. Indeed I can lose bits and pieces of my body and still consider myself the same person.

I may be the same person (or maybe I'm not, the self might merely be a conventional truth), but I am not the same organism if I lose parts of my body. My body (or perhaps me?) has undergone a change. Depending on your views on composition and persistence, my body (I?) may or may not continue to exist.

The "I" which my body produces forgets its own origination and believes itself to be the owner of the body - when it is really the body which owns the self, or more precisely, the body which owns itself.

So I take it that "I", in the phenomenological sense, is an integral part of a biological system. "I" may not identify with "my" body, but "my" body is the rest of the biological system, all doing their parts for better or for worse.

Indeed the apparent authority I have over my body is placed into doubt when at the emergency room, whether that be by disease, injury or old age. If I had control over my body, I should be able to stop these things from happening. Alas, I do not, because I cannot. The body has enslaved itself, through a reflexive and recursive phenomenon known as the Self, held in check and ultimately shaped by various transparent constraints.

It's kind of disorienting to this about the body this way. You might have certain wishes, but your body has others. It's like a weight, you want to think you're independent from it but it nevertheless gets in the way and drags you down. It's no surprise that the great, historic people are either those who managed to seclude themselves in such a way as to minimize their friction with their own body, or who were able and willing to embrace their bodily needs and operate akin to a well-oiled machine in harmonious repetition, not thinking too much but thinking enough to ensure survival and procreation.

I agree, AIDS pride and similar movements are basically coping mechanisms.

Just because a trans person has a horrible experience of dysphoria, it doesn't necessarily means they are incapable of task or less fit to survive. To experience something horrible doesn't mean you are some how useless and unfit for anything else. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Nor did I intend to imply this. I meant that in a bygone age, transgenderism would not have passed the status quo, as we had different goals back then, such as reproduction and gender-designated social roles. In today's day and age, we have much more freedom to be an individual instead of a cookie-cutter derived from evolutionary need.

Compare this to the case with women. Feminists will often speak of the past age in which women were suited to do different sorts of things than men. They didn't hunt, nor did they usually fight over mates. But in the present day we have no such need for these gender roles.

The worry I had was that I would be called out as a bigot simply for saying some people would rather be someone else than who they are, because they perceive the alternative to be superior. Which I suspect is actually more of a product of their environment than some inherent essential human psychological urge. A gay man might wish to be straight because he lives in an environment of anti-gay sentiments. If he grew up in a progressive area, however, this might be different. It all depends.

I also do not wish to be seen as a close-minded bigot, but I suspect that if given the choice from the very start of life, most people would choose to be heterosexual and cisgendered, in the same way they would choose to be tall rather than short, strong rather than weak, intelligent rather than dim.

The reality is that not everyone is tall, strong, intelligent, heterosexual, or cisgendered, even if these would have been evolutionarily advantageous. It is an inconvenient truth that nobody seems to want to address publicly: not everyone is equal. Some people are indeed better suited to do things than others.

The righteousness of things will depend on what our goals are. If our goals are instinctual and bent on surviving in a pre-technological and pre-leisure community, then indeed those who are not suited to fulfill the necessary roles will be looked down upon.

But as the civil rights activists have pointed out, we no longer live in Darwinian communities. We no longer need to discriminate between appearances for protection. And we no longer need to be heterosexual or cisgendered in order to manage.

Because our collective goals have moved on from our ancestral instincts, we no longer need these obfuscating and discriminatory principles. So there's nothing wrong with being homosexual or transgendered. Although notice how most people would like it if you could be tall, strong, and bright, because it would benefit the community. Once again we have the subjugating nature of goals.

What does pragmatism have to say about two competing theories of equal plausibility and appeal? You say you are a realist about an external world if I remember correctly, whereas I am actually leaning towards straight-up idealism. Both are able to capture the same things. They are empirically equivalent. Realism, in my view, could be seen as a historical and biased prejudice.

To put it another way, then, you can't criticize language without using language. You can't argue against argument without using argument. You can't fully disprove or withdraw from reason without using reason in the process of doubt.

Just speaking from personal experience, I have to agree with . Not everything I do is from boredom. I often do things because I like to do them. I find them interesting and fun, or because I have to do things out of necessity.

I think boredom is a byproduct of consciousness. If we view sentients such as humans as some kind of "machine" (not necessarily literally), then it is our "programming" to accomplish things. That's what Heidegger called the nature of action: accomplishment.

So instead of saying boredom is the "natural" experience of humans and other sentient organisms, we should see boredom as what happens when we aren't able to fulfill our telos, so to speak.

Instead of boredom being the most significant emotion, I would say fatigue is the more proper "emotion" and even suitable on a larger cosmic scale. Things fatigue. They break down. Bits and pieces go missing. The structure falls apart.

We see this everywhere, including biological organisms, whose ultimate destination is death. To exist means to be dying. So humans get boredom when they fatigue and run out of energy to focus on things that might interest them. Boredom isn't the most fundamental emotion as much as it is the final destination of every sentient project.

If by "significant" you meant "inevitable", "effortless", or "guaranteed", then yes, I would say boredom is one of the most significant features of conscious experience. If you get rid of everything else, you have boredom. Which makes sense considering conscious reasoning evolved as a counterfactual method of problem-solving and deception. It has a purpose and when it cannot be applied to this purpose, consciousness "breaks" in the Heidegerrean sense and we get boredom.

But as long as we have a sufficient amount of things to do that interest us, boredom and the instrumentality phenomenon you speak of is rather unimportant, side-lined as a mere possibility (threat).

And if not boredom, then anxiety is the baseline human emotion.

The hinge beliefs Wittgenstein primarily focused on were those required for reason itself. Skepticism and doubt are inherently rational. They depend upon the ability to reason. You can't have global skepticism because that would entail doubt of reason itself. We can doubt the fruits of reason, sure, but reason itself cannot be doubted on pain of contradiction. It is always a given.

If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around, does it still make a sound? — dukkha

It still makes compressive waves in the air. Without a mind, though, no sound is made. In the same way your alarm clock beeps for a while before you wake up. You only register a beep when you are conscious.

Where scepticism goes off the rails is in ontology. It might be entertaining to consider the unlikely - like that the world doesn't exist, it's all in the mind, or it's all demonic illusion. But it is not useful to pretend to believe the unlikely. You don't really doubt unless you are fully prepared to act on that doubt. At which point it has just turned into a belief. — apokrisis

A Buddhist perspective on epistemology is that there are two types of "truth": ultimate and conventional. Conventional truths are made of ultimate truths, but are not legitimate in themselves. An example of this as an analogy might be the denial of objects, or mereological nihilism. We commonly see objects around us, from vacuum cleaners to clouds to tigers to moons. But the mereological nihilist will argue that these objects don't actually "exist" and that only the various mereological simples do in various arrangements and patterns (cloud-like, tiger-like, etc). In this case, it could be said that the object is the conventional truth and the part-simples are the ultimate truth.

Indeed the Buddha was a heavy empiricist and quite skeptical of unobservables and static entities. The idea of staticity is a conventional truth, according to Gautama.

But Gautama was also very much so a pragmatist. He did not advocate philosophizing for the sake of philosophizing. Instead, action, according to Gautama, should be primarily focused on the soteriological endeavor. This means that conventional knowledge may still be useful for us to achieve some end. This can be compared to the concept of desert, or perhaps even karma depending on the interpretation.

The bottom line is that conventional truth is only useful if it is harnessed for a greater cause: in the Buddha's case, it was soteriological release from birth. So the Buddhist tradition definitely has pragmatic aspects, not in search of truth per se but in search of truth for the sake of karmic release.

What is the purpose behind westernized pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey)? In what sense are we to see theories as "useful", i.e. to what end? Is truth simply equivalent to what is useful, or is usefulness the best method of obtaining truth in the correspondence sense of knowledge? If the latter, then pragmatism seems to become more of a methodology than a metaphysical theory of knowledge itself.

Keeping Ourselves in the Dark by Colin Feltham

Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science and Value by Willem B. Drees

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Brian Davies

Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed by Cornelis de Waal

and a few others

Didn't Quine want to naturalize philosophy, and transform psychology into a sort of epistemology? In that knowledge would not be the only aspect of epistemology, but also how we come to know such knowledge, i.e. learning as you said, which of course would have important consequences for theories of knowledge.

I've noticed that there haven't really been any crippling defeats in scepticism, which makes me wonder, can't you disprove any philosophy? — Hobbez

This is false. Wittgenstein disproved global skepticism by his analysis of hinge beliefs. Global skepticism is self-defeating.

Skepticism in general is good, but today it seems like people are equivocating hyper-skepticism with intelligence, when really all it is, is intellectual laziness.

No, I don't think philosophers are trying too hard to sound smart.

Philosophy is one of those things that you have to actually do yourself to understand it. Philosophy cannot be communicated like a pop-science magazine that tells you we've discovered this or solved that problem. It's a pro and a con. A pro being that it can really change your life for the better. A con being that it makes a lot of impatient people look down on philosophy as being "obscure" or what have you.

So when philosophers are communicating to the public, they admittedly have to tone down the intellectual talk, which unfortunately sacrifices important nuances that get reflected in the comment sections of newspaper editorials. But when philosophers are writing to other philosophers, they don't need to really worry about being "over-intellectual".

A more important problem with philosophy (and other forms of inquiry for that matter) would be the exoteric vs esoteric divide. A metaphysician may understand what "substance" means, or what "metaphysical grounding" means, but nobody else does.

Fuck off, then.

People often argue that a fetus is a human life and that all human life should be valued equally. I don't see how we as a society could do that. More specifically I don't see any logically justifiable reason to hold human life to a higher importance than all life. The concept of all human life being equal but more important than lower intelligence life is ridiculous. To me the logical step is to make a value hierarchy for all life. Obviously a fetus would be lower on that than the woman carrying it. Any thoughts? — MonfortS26

You seem to be contradicting yourself here. On one hand you claim that speciesism is ridiculous, but then claim that we ought to have a moral hierarchy of all life.

I would argue that anything that can feel (sentience), and more specifically, anything that can suffer, is worthy of being considered ethically important. If a fetus can feel, then it is important to consider its experiences. If it cannot feel, then it might as well be a rock. There's no use anthropomorphizing rocks, trees, water molecules, and a clump of fetal tissue. Nothing happens to them that is morally important outside of our own attachments to them.

The question is whether you trust your instinct or overrule it with reason. — Hanover

Yet how does reason begin if not from certain basic intuitions? (the external world exists, other people exist, I myself exist, x is a sound premise, my mental representations are probably not deceiving me too much, etc.)

There are some basic "intuitions" or beliefs that one must have in order for reason to even take off. Wittgenstein called these "hinge beliefs". They cannot be reasonably doubted without utilizing them in the process of doubting.

I agree, but I haven't concluded that yet. I am in despair over not finding any good reason. Only fools jump to conclusions like that (atheists, christians, etc.) — intrapersona

Indeed this seems to be a reasonable position, however it also seems to offer quite little in the way of prescriptive action. So we're left with a kind of dizzying uncertainty - do I walk my dog, do I ask that girl out, do I contemplate the nature of the divine, do I kill myself, do I watch the clock tick endlessly, do I study thermodynamics, do I vote for this guy or that guy, do I get a spray tan, do I make a smoothie, do I take a nap, do I read Hegel, do I do I do I do I do I ...

At some point in time your biological needs take over and you are forced into action, reluctancy be damned.

Do we live for something? Does the divine give us fulfillment? Can we revolt against the absurd? All of these thoughts seem inspiring, yet oddly distant or esoteric, as if it's always the other people who have it all figured out, and we're just playing catch-up. Don't agree with So-and-So? Then read Such-and-Such, fuck So-and-So, Such-and-Such has all the answers. And on it goes.

Obviously many will disagree with me when I say this, but I don't see very many good reasons to accept that even a single person "has it all figured out." Not the egotistical pop-scientists, not the religious nuts, not the academic philosophers (who have made neuroticism a discipline), not the stoner kid down the street, not the heroic explorer or patriot, not the spiritual gurus, not you, me, or anyone else here. Hell, God Almighty probably doesn't even know what the fuck is going on.

Now this doctrine of uncertainty is ironically a rather "certain" doctrine - indeed if taken literally it would lead to a contradiction: I am positively sure that nobody, including myself, knows anything substantial (a quite substantial claim!) But it seems to me that this belief in the uncertainty is more of a gut-reaction than a crisp theoretical position - yet surely gut-reactions have some credentials in cases like this.

So maybe, just maybe (notice the uncertainty?) a point of existence can be derived from a skeptical curiosity that the doctrine of uncertainty will be falsified in the future. Prove me wrong, Universe. Show me there is an overarching purpose. I'll stick around and eat some popcorn in the meantime, entertained by the whole absurdity and metaphysical uncertainty of it all.

And when I die, if there is no meaning to be found, I'll ask the Universe to guess what finger I'm holding up.

What the fuck is going on on this forum right now?! Seriously guys, get your shit together, it's a fucking internet forum.

Platinum rule is superior: treat others in the way they want to be treated. How you wish to be treated may not be equivalent to how someone else wishes to be treated.

I would personally argue that the most serious philosophical problem isn't whether or not we should cease our own consciousness, but whether or not we ought to create another consciousness. For the former question inherently depends on the the latter question.