Humans are an existential animal. That is to say, why we start any endeavor or project (or choose to continue with it or end it) is shaped continually by a deliberative act to do so. — schopenhauer1

In my experience, both of myself and others, this is not true at all. I think this misunderstanding is a consequence of people not being aware of their own motivations and where they come from.

We generate things that might excite us. Or we generate things we feel we "must do" (even though there is never a must, only an anxiety of not doing based on various perceived fears). — schopenhauer1

We've had this conversation before. You and I have a different understanding and experience of what it is like to be a human. I don't think that everyone thinks, feels, and lives the same as I do. It seems as if you think they do.

Really hard to read. Needs more paragraph breaks.

While I do not agree with all of what he says, I agree with much of it. — Dfpolis

As I noted, I don't understand all of it, but there's something there. I've spent a lot of time thinking about reductionism, holism, emergence, and that constellation of ideas that includes them. I've got more work to do.

I invite comments pro and con. — Dfpolis

Before I start, I want to be clear. I have only an engineer's interested, amateur understanding of cognitive science or philosophy of mind. I also admit to just scanning the linked article. I am not well-read enough to make a line-by-line response to your detailed and careful argument.

To start, it's very well written. Clear and thorough. I don't think I've read a better one here on the forum. But then, I find it flawed and unconvincing. The article states:

I see two sources of difficulty: the post-Cartesian conceptual space, and the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science. — Dfpolis

This indicates the problems with the scientific study of consciousness are philosophical, logical, not scientific. That shows my primary problem with your argument - you have shuffled the decks of philosophy and science together to provide a muddled, makeshift argument. When you deal out a science card you often make blanket pronouncements without support. You make a quick arm-wave to current cognitive scientific study of consciousness without showing you have given them a fair hearing. You talk about a Standard Model of neurophysiology which, as far as I can tell, is a concept you came up with yourself. I can't find any reference to it with a quick web search.

I share your skepticism about a reductionist scientific understanding of consciousness. This is from a paper on Merleau-Ponty's theory of form which I think is relevant. Streetlight provided a link to the paper in a discussion about five years ago.

Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot understand how knowledge arises within nature unless we abandon the Cartesian view of nature as a machine composed of mutually external and indifferent parts.

If nature is a mechanism then it has no intrinsic meaning or unity. Thus nature could only be meaningful for a constituting consciousness that imposes a meaning on it by synthesizing its disconnected parts into an ideal whole. However, this amounts to denying that we can know nature at all. First, it means that nature can only be known from the outside, from a God’s-eye-view that could comprehend it as an object. But this is not our situation; we find ourselves born into a nature that is older than thought, and indeed gives rise to it—a nature that we can never encompass or transcend. “Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not entirely an object; it does not exactly stand before us. It is our soil, not that which faces us, but that which carries us.” It is precisely for this reason that we wish to naturalize epistemology—to understand how knowledge arises within nature. Second, if the only meaning we can find in nature is one that we ourselves put into it, then nature ceases to be an object of knowledge that transcends consciousness and becomes instead an idea within consciousness—a representation or mental construct. — Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking

There's a lot more going on in the paper, some of which I admit to not understanding, but the author does not conclude that the study of mind is not accessible to scientific study.

I think there is a valid argument to be made for your position. I do worry some about how our languages are being changed for what I consider trivial or unnecessary reasons. Even so, I don't think you've made your case very well. The two examples you've cited are not really convincing. I don't have strong feelings about "Latinx" but it's pretty early in the controversy. There were similar changes I think have turned out well, e.g. providing "Ms." as an alternative to "Mrs." and "Miss." I understand this example is more important to you since you are Spanish-speaking. As for the apostrophe issue, the etymology you suggest seems pretty far-fetched to me.

Some fiddling with language pisses me off, but some makes sense. An example - I remember reading a non-fiction psychology book I had heard good things about. In the preface, the author indicated he had alternated using "she," and "he;" and "him" and "her" in different sections of the text. I thought it was a stupid and distracting change to make. Then, as I read, I found it really made a difference in how I thought about what he was writing.

The problem: given the original scenario, such a person is now equivalent to the Jews in Nazi Germany - they are being persecuted. However, why aren't the people who sent this person into such a life now equivalent to the Nazis - as they are now doing the persecuting? Discuss... — jasonm

This is just another case of what I call "the Paradox Paradox." That's where people call uncertain or ironic circumstances or simple inconsistencies paradoxes.

Also, calling a religious belief paradoxical sort of misses the point.

I do agree with you, but it probably also remains an issue for the site in general, where many write such short posts, with one line remarks and emoticons. It isn't an academic site, but, sometimes, there seems to be so much which is shallow and lacking in philosophical depth in discussion. It is so complex on a site which is neither a chit chat one or one of formal academic philosophy, and Agent Smith's contributions may draw attention to this dilemma. — Jack Cummins

I agree with this, but I think the moderators have done a good job making a place where the rules are not so tight or enforced so strictly that they exclude non-standard approaches to philosophical subjects but not so loose as to allow low-quality writing to overwhelm the good stuff. I don't think it's an easy balance.

I don't mean to say that great questions are unimportant or should not be addressed, but I don't think philosophy is useful in addressing them, unless we mean by philosophy art, poetry, meditation and pursuits which evoke rather than seek to explain. Those are pursuits which are better left to those who aren't philosophers. — Ciceronianus

There is important truth in this.

And that may be a fool’s errand. I think that’s Neitzsche’s point anyway. I tend to agree. But you did say “to the extent possible,” so I take your point. — Mikie

The effort is the point. It's not where you get, it's how you got there. That's philosophy.

Thought people might be interested in this. It's a good AP story including an interview with the foreman of the Georgia special grand jury looking into election fraud. Has some really interesting things to say about the process the grand jury went through, although nothing about the actual testimony, deliberations, decisions, or report.

https://apnews.com/article/politics-new-york-city-only-on-ap-donald-trump-georgia-266e28c4e47e54731b233e0f770f6729

I think a big part was not simply curiosity, but fear — Mikie

For me, I think it was primarily curiosity. I just want to know how it all fits together. What happens next. It's fun, play.

I look around and notice it with others too. We simply don’t realize that so much of what we think we know, who we listen to, the company we keep, the jobs we do, and how we generally live our lives, is determined by factors beyond our control — the time and place you are born, your genes, your parents and upbringing, your culture and peers, early life experiences, education, etc. — Mikie

That's one of the main points of philosophy - to get beyond those cultural, social, and historical factors to the extent possible.

I give the floor to you. — Alkis Piskas

To go off in a bit different direction... I just finished "What Is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology" by Addy Pross. In it, he goes to a lot of trouble to define survival of the fittest in chemical terms as dynamic kinetic stability, which removes a lot of possibly unwanted implications from the process. This is from one of Pross's papers:

Recent developments in the relatively new area of chemistry, systems chemistry have been showing that the reactivity patterns of simple replicating systems may assist in the building of conceptual bridges between the physicochemical (inanimate) and biological (animate)worlds . A key element in that effort has been the ability to specify and characterize a new kind of stability–dynamic kinetic stability (DKS), one that pertains to replicating systems, whether chemical or biological In the ‘regular’ chemical world, stability is normally associated with lack of reactivity. However, in the world of persistent replicating systems, the stability of the system comes about because of its reactivity. The system is stable in the sense of being persistent, by its being able to maintain a continuing presence through on-going replication. Of course, in order to be able to continue to replicate and maintain a presence, the system must be unstable in a thermo-dynamic sense. From that perspective it can be seen that a biological system which is characterized as ‘fit’, can be thought of as stable, but its stability is of that ‘other kind’, rather than exemplifying the more familiar thermodynamic kind. This way of thinking then enables established biological terms, such as ‘fitness’ and ‘maximizing fitness’ to be equated with their chemical equivalents: Fitness = Dynamic kinetic stability (DKS); Maximizing fitness = Drive toward greater DKS. — How Does Biology Emerge from Chemistry?

The linked website also includes a review of the very short article.

We went out of our way to keep him here, — Jamal

I appreciate the effort. I don't envy you the balancing act you have to perform.

I think I mentioned that other book, which Apokrisis mentioned. — Wayfarer

I guess you must have recommended it in one of the other branches of the multiverse.

Just finished "What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology," by Addy Pross. I think @Wayfarer recommended it to me, but I can't find the post.

I liked the book. It has interesting detail about how evolution starts, not with life, but with replicative chemistry, which in turn provides the mechanism by which non-living matters becomes living organisms . That's something I was looking for after reading "Life's Ratchet" by Peter Hoffman, which deals more with how life works chemically and mechanically at the cellular level rather than how it began.

The book was a bit too breezy, gee whiz, pop sciencey for my taste. More importantly, Pross had a drum to bang, which he did over and over. His point - biology is chemistry. Reductionism is the right way to look at things. Many times here on the forum I have banged my own drum about reductionism with a reference to "More is Different," an article by P.W Anderson which strongly disputes the reductionist viewpoint. Pross has made me rethink that position, although he hasn't changed my mind. What annoyed me is that I don't see how the dispute is relevant to the information about how life starts that I was really interested in.

Still, worth reading.

An interesting article. Looks like the downed balloon in Canada had nothing to do with China.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/the-us-airforce-may-have-shot-down-an-amateur-radio-pico-balloon-over-canada/

Peter Ziehan (author, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization) thinks Russia wants to repossess the Ukraine as part of Russia's long term strategy to establish secure western borders and buffer states between itself and (now, NATO). Interests, again, rather than individual obnoxiousness. — BC

Good post. TIL about the roots of World War I. "TIL" is what all us hip youngsters say instead of "today I learned."

One thing that I keep thinking about during the Ukraine fighting - The US shares culpability for how things have turned out. Once the Soviet Union folded, the US and Europe started allowing, encouraging, former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO. Suddenly Russia found itself surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors with military backing instead of subservient client states. I don't blame them for feeling resentful and threatened.

Now I worry we have entered another period like the time before WWI. The lines are drawn, people have chosen sides, nobody will back down, and things are playing out as they will. A little miscalculation could set off very bad things. And then, around the block, there's China which might be heading in the same direction. Frightens me.

Are you saying that any time someone is threatened, extorted, or coerced they should give in to avoid harm?

Are you saying that the harm the Ukrainians are currently undergoing is more important than their national independence?

To me the world seems an amoral and dangerous place (at best). — Tom Storm

I think our different ways of seeing things are probably a matter of temperament, i.e. a way of thinking we're born with rather than the result of learning or experience. I've always seen the world as beautiful and funny. I feel as if I belong here, in spite of some bad things and unhappiness along the way.

I got my wife a balloon yesterday that said "Happy Valentine's Day. — Hanover

That could explain a lot. Perhaps the Chinese were just wishing us a Happy Valentines Day.

My point here is that if the Chinese came up with the grand idea that they were going to hold a camera over Montana and think they were going to see something that airplanes, radar, satellites, Google maps, and passersbys don't already see and that was going to give them some advantage, they aren't quite the threat we thought them to be. — Hanover

It's my understanding that the balloon included antennas for electronic surveillance. Perhaps that's not something that can be done from space. Which isn't to say I don't share your bemusement about the seeming rinky-dinkness of the Chinese balloons.

"Bemusement" is a more intellectual, sophisticated word for "confusion." Alternatively, it is a word for a more intellectual, sophisticated confusion.

"Rinky-dinkness" is a more amusing word for a lack of sophistication. Alternatively, it is a word for a more amusing lack of sophistication.

Makoto Fujimura on Emily Dickinson — Noble Dust

Thanks. Interesting article. I am generally suspicious of articles about poets, poetry, and poems. Writers like to pick them apart and turn them into something else, as if they knew what the poet was trying to do better than she did. This one didn't. It was insightful and respectful.

You started this discussion but haven't participated after the first post. That's considered impolite.

An even-handed and generally reasonable post. I agree with a lot, but not all, of it.

Everything you've argued could also lead to 'so who cares? — Tom Storm

I can understand why someone wouldn't care. I wouldn't care myself except for all the people who hate religion and care very deeply. I don't include you in that group.

Emily Dickinson — Wayfarer

It's always satisfying when poetry does philosophy well.

You and I see things differently.

Can you be more specific — Gnomon

It is not true that particles have been superseded.

There is no evidence It exists or has done anything to deserve your thanks. — universeness

Someone, something, somewhere deserves thanks for this wonderful world.

It isn't. — unenlightened

I'm convinced.

You see, either you bite the bullet of a 'transcendent' person who give s a fuck, or you have a half assed personification of the generality of 'life' which obviously doesn't give a fuck. And why should we give a fuck for that which doesn't give one? — unenlightened

If I intended to bite a bullet, which I don't, it wouldn't be for either of the choices you've offered.

Convince me that it is worth even speculating about this. — unenlightened

Convince me it is worth convincing you.

Thank you. I appreciate the help.

Something living but impersonal? — unenlightened

Yeah, I struggled with the right way to say it. Conscious but impersonal? Not even that really. It's that reality can't be separated from human involvement, so the universe is half-human.

A good case could be made for extending national air space all the way into space, though. — Tzeentch

Do you mean 300,000 feet or indefinitely.

I think just about everyone would disagree with that.

an incident such as this one is quite extraordinary. — Tzeentch

I guess it's obvious from what I've said earlier, but I don't necessarily agree. That's why I was asking for an explanation.

I see all four points as perfectly compatible with my statement, — Tzeentch

I guess I misinterpreted you. I thought you were saying that the US's loss of hegemony would be a bad thing. That assumption on my part was what I was responding to.

U2 reconnaissance aircraft flew on the edge of space, far above what is normally considered "national air space". So technically the U.S. did not invade Soviet air space in 1960. — Tzeentch

According to Wikipedia, the U2 flies at a maximum altitude of about 70,000 feet and the edge of space is defined as about 300,000 feet.

Speaking of the U2, it amazes me that it is still be used now almost 70 years after it was first built. It still looks all cool and futuristic. B52s are still being used too.

The first reason would be, because it's illegal under international law, just like violating national waters is illegal. Both are essentially breaches of a nation's sovereignty. — Tzeentch

Sure. That's why it's an international incident. I still don't see why it is a major incident.

The second is that a nation's air space (especially that of superpowers) is heavily surveilled for purposes of national defense and security. All the missile defense systems in the world are not going to help if the enemy launches its attack when it's already ontop of one's cities. — Tzeentch

That doesn't seem like a plausible scenario.

However in a period like this, where large-scale conflict has already broken out in Europe and can break out tomorrow in the Pacific, an incident like this is not so innocent anymore. — Tzeentch

I didn't say it was innocent, I said I don't understand why it is such a big deal.

More interesting was how the act of shooting down the balloons was viewed, as the Pentagon apparently on several occasions made statements that would imply the shooting down of the balloon may have been unlawful. — Tzeentch

Yes, I found that interesting too, although the consensus of the people referenced in the article is that it was legal. I always assumed it was and I wasn't suggesting that it shouldn't have been.

So … I can’t think how you could solve it. — Jamal

Thanks for the response. It's not a big deal, but I thought if there was a simple fix I could do it. Apparently the picture shows up for at least some people on their mobile phones.

I wasn't aware my thumbs up was notorious. I thought it was charming and idiosyncratic. But no, it happens for other images as well. At the same time, many images do show up on my mobile.

Anyway, we can leave it at that. Thanks again.

It'll probably be easier for you to buy a second phone and see how your uploads work than to get a straight answer out of me. — Hanover

I heard the flip phone is making a come back. There's nothing cooler than slouching back in your chair, flipping the phone so that it opens up, putting it to your ear, and saying "sup." Nothing. Height of coolness. — Hanover

I do enjoy your amusing, ironic fantasies about your own past or present coolness, but, as moderator, do you have anything more substantive to offer? Perhaps some of your brethren do.

Impersonal gods are not worth talking to or (therefore) talking about. Stick to physics, no impersonal god will care. — unenlightened

I don't agree with this. The recognition that it is worthwhile to see the universe, reality, as something living is an important one. It changes how you see everything. It gives something to be grateful to for all we have been given. God as a metaphysical entity is a useful way of seeing things.

All words mean something and may be useful.
A word can refer to an objective reality (ex, water) or not (ex. unicorn).
The OP discusses if "substance" refers to an objective reality of not. — Art48

Well there you go. "Objective reality." It's just a word. Well.. two words. I don't want to distract your thread from where you're aiming it, so I won't take that argument any further.

We're on the verge of entering a period of major geopolitical strife, in which Russia and China will likely band together against the U.S. to challenge its position as hegemon. — Tzeentch

I think we're already in that period. I'm very worried about where the war in Ukraine will lead. On the other hand, I think the idea that Russia and China will somehow "band together against the U.S. to challenge its position as hegemon," is wrongheaded on three counts. 1) Most importantly, the US's position as "hegemon" is going to over soon whether we like it or not. That's not because of China and Russia in particular but more because other countries, some former third world, are taking a larger role in the world. 2) That's probably a good thing, both for the world and the US. 3) Russia and China are in no position to become hegemons. Russia is very weak except for nuclear weapons. China is still a limited thread, although it is growing. 4) Neither Ukraine nor Taiwan is worth risking a wider war with other nuclear powers. Hey, wait. That's more than three. I could probably come up with more.

First off I'd like to point out that this is a major international incident. — Tzeentch

This is something I've wondered about. I'm not saying it's not important, but why such a big deal? We all already have spy satellites, we all know the other is trying to look at us.

It's worth noting that during most of the Cold War, invasions this deep into the other's airspace were quite rare, and generally avoided. — Tzeentch

This is not true. Look up "U2 incident 1960."

What is strange about these events is that, while invasions of another nation's air space are highly illegal and not very common, reconnaissance fly-overs with satellites, balloons and planes that fly on the edge of space (above national air space) are nothing new, albeit still somewhat controversial. — Tzeentch

I found this interesting article on the legality of the situation. I'm not qualified to judge it's contents, but it seems reasonable.

https://sites.duke.edu/lawfire/2023/02/05/guest-post-the-chinese-balloon-shoot-down-incident-and-the-law-some-observations/

If China has the means to carry out its reconnaissance in a legal manner in space, why would it invade U.S. air space? — Tzeentch

Good question.