. I work with people who can not read and can not do even the most basic math. They are adults living in a foster home because they can not safely care for themselves. I think we can agree they do NOT have the intelligence necessary for survival yet I think we also agree they are human. — Athena

I perfectly agree, it is obviously fundamental to human rights that such people are cared for. I lived for a long while beside a group home for intellectually disabled men, who had carers and social workers to look after them. I often reflected that in many poorer countries such people would be left in the care of relatives or abandoned to their fate. It was heart-warming to see the lengths that had been gone to to care for these people some of whom had the mental age of small children.

However, that said, intellectually disabled persons are not representative of being human. I suppose to put it in classical terms of essence and accident, their disability is an accident whilst their humanity is essential. I also agree with the Aristotelian classification of the human as 'rational animal', in that we're clearly descended from and related to all other species from a biological perspective, but that the ability to reason, think and speak distinguishes humans from other animals in a fundamental way.

I semi-seriously wonder if the soul of Putin died some decades ago and his body taken over by the malevolent spirit which also animated Josef Stalin, which lurks around the Kremlin waiting for some potential body to inhabit. After all, Putin's high- school teacher couldn't remember Vlad, he was such a colorless and unexceptional pupil. So now he's just become a carrier for that same industrial-scale cruelty and malevolence that his predecessor exhibited.

My thought on it is that it's not the job of science as currently practiced to explain or account for the laws of nature. Put simply, 'naturalism assumes nature'. In other words, science starts from the observation of nature, which already exhibits regularities, patterns and principles, and attempts to discern the nature of those relationships, how they operate, and how they can be represented mathematically or abstractly. But science can't explain why f=ma or e=mc² - or perhaps you could say that any attempt at that level or kind of explanation enters the realm of metaphysics as a matter of definition, and so is no longer in the domain of natural science. However this is a distinction that appears to elude many popular science writers, many of whom seem to think that the principles that govern phenomena can be extrapolated to a notional first cause through a kind of reverse engineering, a notable example being Lawrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing.

C. S. Pierce says that nature forms habits. So for that matter does Rupert Sheldrake. However there is an implied metaphysics in that apparently obvious idea, in that habits are the attributes of intentional agents, as they imply memory and expectation, which are normally considered excluded from the inanimate domain. Arguably it's a form of panpsychism.

There's a philosopher of science called Nancy Cartwright - not to be confused with the actor of that name - who has a paper called No God, No Laws, for anyone interested.

My thesis is summarized in my title, ‘No God, No Laws’: the concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God. It is not as dramatic a thesis as it might look, however. I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God. Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God. — Nancy Cartwright

I find it hard to believe that naive realism exists very much among adults. — igjugarjuk

I find it exceedingly easy to believe, I encounter it in very many discussions on this forum - not as an articulated or explicit philosophy but as a set of implicit assumptions, questioning of which often results in eye-rolling or exasperation.

But can we move from this to insisting that there was nothing here before we were able to talk about it ? — igjugarjuk

I think of that as the 'imagined non-existence' of the world - imagining that the world didn't exist, prior to the mind, and then begins to exist with the awareness of it. But that implicitly relies on a perspective which you can never actually assume - as if you're able to be aware of the Universe from a perspective outside your awareness of the Universe.

From the empirical perspective it is true that the world existed before any particular mind came along. But it is the mind that furnishes the framework within which the whole concept of temporal priority is meaningful in the first place.

You may recall this passage:

'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

So, I think the argument is that philosophical realism assumes that empirical knowledge portrays the world as it truly is. But it can't do that, because it can't get outside the conditions under which objectivity is possible in the first place. Another way of putting it is that it forgets the role of the the mind in arriving at such judgements. This is why there's been an emerging trend in philosophy the last few decades around the rediscovery of the subject. And a lot of that goes back to phenomenology and thence to Kant.

So, what I'm getting from this book is the sense in which you can say that the mind creates the universe. It's not some spooky cosmic mind, but every mind, or mind in general.

My own take is that we can grant that the world as humanly experience is naturally dependent upon the experiencing human. But I don't see how we can leap from this truism to a denial of the world's independent existence, even if I admit that it's difficult indeed to articulate exact 'how' it is supposed to exist in this sense. — igjugarjuk

I don't think you can extract the sense in which the world exists apart from our participatory observation in it.

The underlying issue is that the classical attitude of modern science was to assume a stance of complete objectivity, by reducing the objects of analysis to purely quantitative terms. This was supposedly to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere' which was understood to be what was truly there. As noted above, this attitude has been undermined, or superseded, by enactivism and the embodied cognition approach that was pioneered by Varela and Thomson. There are also many parallels in physics arising from the well-known 'observer problem' - consider for example Wheeler's 'participatory universe' wherein the act of cognition is intrinsic to the nature of what is observed.

I'm just now reading a very interesting and highly relevant book on this subject, Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics, Charles Pinter. He's a mathematician and emeritus professor with a long history in mathematical modelling especially of problems in neuroscience. His basic contention is that the features and structure of everything we see is transformed into a gestalt (a meaningful whole) by the process of cognition, which occurs in even the most simple of organisms (fairyflies, 0.5mm in length) and this cogntive act is what creates the structure that we perceive as 'the Universe'. He contrasts that with the instinctive view of naive realism, which is also a consequence of the same evolutionary processes that give rise to cognition in the first place (with the caveat that humans are potentially able to 'deconstruct' this instictive, but fallacious, sense of reality.)

So is the fundamental substance in the physicalist universe not ‘energy?’ — universeness

It used to be thought of as matter, but then e=mc² was discovered, along with electromagnetic fields (not to mention "the observer problem"). But that all happened after 1905 so it's out-of-bounds for this thread.

More like he has to appeal to their self-interest but it culminates with the realisation that there is no self whose interests need to be served. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, that is called ‘upaya’, ‘skilful means’ (sometimes paraphrased as ‘holy cunning’, i.e. ‘cunning as serpents, wise as doves’.)

I get that virtue is a reward in itself but all religions, without exception I'd say, peddle virtue as a means to paradise, attaining nirvana, achieving moksha and so on — Agent Smith

The 'parable of the burning house' is about the fact that the father (Buddha) has to entice the children (sentient beings) from the burning house (regular existence, sickness, old age and death) by enticing them with gifts ('attaining Nirvāṇa'). But when they have escaped from the burning house, then they realise that they had been in terrible danger. So the reward is not dying in the burning house - which is not really a reward at all, except in comparison to the alternative.

More Buddhist lore - The Parable of the Burning House

We know better.

peddle virtue as a means to paradise, — Agent Smith

Nah. That’s just what preachers do. Or have to do.

Remember Aristotles’s dictum: Virtue is its own reward. So pursuing virtue for some other reason subverts virtue.

I have no trouble distinguishing you ;-)

that aphorism is regularly used as a cudgel on this forum.

Interestingly, there’s a Mahāyāna Buddhist sutra called the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa, a highly recondite text revolving around the enlightenment of a wealthy layman after whom the text is named who is a silk merchant, married, with children, but whose understanding of the subtleties of śūnyatā is so profound that even the Buddha’s closest disciples are afraid to engage him in debate.

In one episode, one of said disciples, Sariputra (the Buddhist disciple who is customarily regarded as the epitome of wisdom) responds to a question with silence. But in this case, Sariputra’s silence is criticised:

Śāriputra abandons speech too quickly, after all. He has been asked a question in a particular context [...] to refuse to speak at such a point is neither an indication of wisdom, nor a means of imparting wisdom, but at best a refusal to make progress [...] Śāriputra's failed silence is but a contrastive prelude to Vimalakīrti's far more articulate silence.

So it may be true ‘of that of which we cannot speak’, but where to draw the line is something that ought to be understood! (And who knew that silence could be so articulate? Simon and Garfunkel, perhaps.)

Trump should be afraid to walk out in public. — Jackson

A significant number of them will applaud him when he does. Unfortunately.

I wonder if Murdoch and Trump will share a cubicle in Hell.

Seems so as the OP stipulates a pre-1905 purview. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Learning how to frame a debate in just the way that the responses don't upset your own 'fundamental presuppositions' is an art form in its own right. :wink:

I know there's an awful lot of anti-democratic ideology in this forum but it's just like Churchill said after defeating Hitler - it's the least bad option. Anyway, I'm going to keep an eye on those hearings today, it's why I've posted the youtube link.

It occurs to me, listening to the pre-broadcast commentary, that a very sizeable minority, and possibly even a majority, of Americans, really do believe that Donald Trump is above the law. They may not express it in those terms, and if you put it to them in those words, they might disagree, but in practice this is what they actually believe. And that's why constitutional democracy is under threat in America - because the very people whose will it is supposed to express no longer believe in it.

Are you proposing that because we do not understand everything, we do not understand anything?

Of course you aren't. — Banno

I'm not proposing you don't know how many cups there are in your cupboard, but pointing to the fact that current cosmological and physical theory is in a state of extreme flux and fragmentation. But of course we can overlook that, if it makes everyone here feel comfortable and satisfied to do so, which appears to be the aim.

Well just recall the historical origins of the 'ordered universe'. The term was 'cosmos', meaning the understanding of the Universe as an ordered whole. And I think that's completely out of sync with the state of current cosmology and physics which is utterly fragmented.

well, at least 4% of it, anyway.
— Wayfarer

A petty point — Banno

You think the discovery that current cosmology accounts for only 4% of the projected totality of the Universe is petty?

Oh, so they're scientifically-approved woo. Well, that's OK then.

Yeah the other 96% is woo :up:

Knowing for example is just some feeling of the nervous system and mental pattern generated by neuro-transmitters…. — Varde

…if you’re a lizard…..

The best explanation for such a situation, it seems to me, is that those two minds exist in a shared world, as it would imply identical or at the very least similar input. For that shared world to be comprehensible by those minds, I believe it would be necessary for it to be structured by space and time. So materialism seems to be the best explanation for the patterns shared by different experiences. — Hello Human

Not in the least. Humans are highly sociable, they live in a shared world of concepts, language, culture, and so on. Don't mistake idealism for solipsism, the belief that only MY mind is real. In actuality, your or my mind is just one instance of 'the human mind'. So that doesn't mitigate against idealism in the least.

I believe that materialism still has value. How could have science developed without materialism? It seems instead that materialism is a useful explanation for patterns in conscious experience. — Hello Human

Reductionism is the natural method of scientists and engineers. But becomes a problem when it's applied to the problems of philosophy, because in that context it is essentially de-humanising, treating humans as objects.

Anyway, I regret to inform you that it isn't clear, still, as to how Nagarjuna's tetralemma is related to ethics — Agent Smith

In the 'axial age' philosophies, generally, ethics are not really separable from epistemology.

Buddhists lost the debate against the Hindus, thus explaining the decline of Buddhism in India. — Agent Smith

The Mughal invasion of India was a much greater factor. They slaughtered Buddhist monks, who put up no resistance, in their tens of thousands.

OK. I think the point is, that the division of these ideas into different subjects or disciplines or schools of thought is very much a modern development. The whole concern of Buddhism is ethics, but in service of the goal of awakening, under which all of the various disciplines are united and harmonised. One of the formulations is that the Buddhist life is supported by the 'three legs of the tripod' - meditation, wisdom and morality. But from another perspective these are all aspects of the same fundamental unity.

As I tried to explain, the Buddha's refusal to countenance certain kinds of questions, is because they're meaningless in terms of the practicalities of Buddhist discipline. They lead to empty speculation, also known as prapanca, 'conceptual proliferation'.

The other point to understand about Nāgārjuna is that he came along half a millenium after the Buddha. During that time Indian culture was at its peak with great debates between the different schools, various Brahmanic (Hindu) schools, but also Buddhist scholasticism which had grown up around the original Buddhist teaching. So that is what Nāgārjuna is critiquing in his verses - he's responding to various philosophical proposals about the true nature of reality, and so on. So his work is highly recondite - very cryptic, extremely terse, and difficult to interpret, even for scholars. It's also radical, seeking to cut through all of the disputes and conflicting doctrines that have developed both within and around the Buddhism of the day.

Very interesting points you raise here — Agent Smith

Which you nevertheless manage not to see, somehow.

//sorry, might have been a bit harsh. But really.....//

There's a parallel between ignorance, avidya, in the Buddhist and generally Indic sense, and the 'original sin' of Christianity. Now, I know that is going to be unpopular, as one of the dogmas of Westernised, middle-class Buddhism is that 'there's no sin in Buddhism'. And it is true that avidya is more a matter of a deficiency of cognition than of a corruption of the will, as sin is in Christianity. Nevertheless, they're both descriptions of the human condition. In the Christian worldview, we're corrupted by the hereditary 'sin of Adam'. In the Buddhist worldview, we're subject to 'beginningless ignorance', as there is no discernable beginning to the ignorance in which all beings (puttajana, 'uneducated worldlings') have been ensnared for 'aeons of kalpas'. There's a saying from Buddhism that I read on a Buddhist forum, 'Avidya has no beginning, but it has an end. Nirvāṇa has a beginning, but it has no end.'

This ethical or moral dimension to Buddhism is something which always seems to elude your attempts to reduce Nāgārjuna's writings to textbook logic. So, again, the reason that the Buddha declared certain questions 'undecideable' or 'out of bounds', is because they're essentially meaningless (something which frequently nags me about much of the activity on this forum.) That is why he compared speculation about them to trying to work out the nature of the poison on a poison arrow that is embedded in your flesh, rather than acting speedily to remove the arrow and treat the poison.

A tiny meteoroid struck the newly deployed James Webb Space Telescope in May, knocking one of its gold-plated mirrors out of alignment but not changing the orbiting observatory's schedule to become fully operational shortly, NASA said on Wednesday.

Engineers believe it can be rectified.

Story here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-09/meteorite-strikes-james-webb-telescope/101137762

[1] We live in an ordered universe that can be understood by humans. — Clarky

well, at least 4% of it, anyway.

If we try to talk about Something that is not Something-in-particular, we will have just the same problem. — Cuthbert

Yes, but in that case, we're talking about something, which by definition is not nothing!

So I maintain the idea of 'pure nothingness' is a fallacy. 'Nothing exists' sounds like an actual proposition as it is grammatically sound, but it's a meaningless combination of words. Maybe it could be described as an antimony: 'a self-contradictory phrase such as "There is no absolute truth" can be considered an antinomy because this statement is suggesting in itself to be an absolute truth, and therefore denies itself any truth in its statement.' 'Nothing exists' is similar, because if it were true there would be nobody to either utter it or interpret it.

Interesting to contemplate whether the sentence 'nothing is real' falls into the same trap. I think not, actually, because the brain-in-vat scenario is at least logically feasible. In which case, a distinction can be made between 'what exists' and 'what is real', which I think is a far more philosophically fruitful line of enquiry, or at least contemplation, than 'nothing exists' is.

But it’s only different in respect of something. Couldn’t help but notice the similarity between what I said and this:

Something is however already a determinate existent that distinguishes itself from another something; consequently, the nothing which is being opposed to something is also the nothing of a certain something, a determinate nothing - Hegel. — Tobias

Although now I’ve learned the meaning of ‘determinate nothing’, which is something. :wink:

That is true, but the score signifies something you didn’t get, namely, a score. But that is only meaningful as a signifier, not as an existent thing. In getting nothing, you don’t get some thing designated as ‘nothing’, the zero is merely the indicator of something not gotten. In that sense, nothingness is dependent on what exists, because if nothing existed, there could be nothing to negate, and nothing is only meaningful in relation to something.

the problem is that 'exist' means 'ex-' outside of, apart from (e.g. external, exile) and 'ist', to stand or to be. So there's nothing about nothing which qualifies for that. If it existed, it would be something. So it can't exist, as a matter of definition.