It's not clear whether the idea is justified that enlightenment is somehow an objective phenomenon, quite independent of religions, and that different religions just have different takes on it. — baker

If we think that 2+2=4 is an eternal truth, indesctructible, unassailable, impossible to question, then you are thinking of it in a metaphysical way. As such, this kind of thought has the defect that not only tomorrow 2+2 might give a different result, but also our thoughts about it might change, because ideas are subject to time, change, becoming, as well as anything else. — Angelo Cannata

Too many Ukrainians, Zelensky told us, died not in battle, but “in the act of torture.” Children got frostbite hiding in cellars; women were raped; elderly people died of starvation; pedestrians were shot down in the street. “How will these people be able to enjoy the victory?” he asked. “They will not be able to do to the Russian soldiers what [the Russians] did to their children or daughters … so they do not feel this victory.” — The Atlantic

I don't know why Moscow thinks an accident sounds better. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was trying to give a fair hearing to the idea that the Ukraine invasion was provoked... — frank

I think we need to shake the traditional views of Parmenides and Heraclitus. This "being versus becoming" is a false one. Why should we presume that "being" means something opposed to "becoming"? This essentially equates being to permanence. — Xtrix

I don't, beyond the fact that Alabama, the Crimson Tide, is one of the winners in the world... — Ciceronianus

My point is that comparative religion offers concepts that are alien to actual religions, concepts that are artificial impositions on actual religions.

For example, the idea that all religions are essentially about the same things, the same desire for the sacred. In contrast, religions typically take a dim view of eachother. — baker

How could the appearance of conscious sentient beings bring the universe into existence if it is not the case "that 'before' we came along it didn't exist". And why the inverted commas around "before"? — Janus

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge... The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant's phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself... But the world as idea... only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. — Schopenhauer

The pride of Russia’s fearsome Black Sea fleet was taken out yesterday in one of the most cunning operations of the war.

Ukrainian commanders destroyed the huge Moskva warship by using drones to distract its defence systems and allowing surface-skimming missiles to strike.

The 12,500-ton cruiser’s protective sensors seemingly did not see the Neptune rockets heading its way because they were tracking Turkish TB2 drones.

Providing a massive boost to morale in Kyiv, and a huge blow to Vladimir Putin’s navy, two missiles slammed into the port side of the 611ft Moskva, rocking her violently and causing a catastrophic explosion and huge fires.

As flames lit up the stormy Black Sea, the ship’s 510 crewmen frantically climbed into lifeboats and fled.
The surprise attack took place at 2am yesterday as the Moskva, Russia’s main ‘command and control’ warship, was 60 miles south of Odessa.

The ship’s captain and air defence officers were said to be tracking the decoy TB2s, unaware a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune R360 anti-ship missiles were heading their way after being launched from an artillery battery on the coastline.

The missiles, each weighing a ton and with a range of 170 nautical miles, approached the Moskva at sea level. Travelling at such a low trajectory in rough seas meant they were difficult to track.

Last night, Western officials said Ukrainian reports of the operation were ‘credible’ and the attack demonstrated their ability to strike the Russians in areas where they assumed they were invulnerable. — The Daily Mail

But what when no actual religious person believes those things? Comparative religion tends to offer concepts that are alien to actual practitioners. Religious people normally don't seem to have a metareligious or suprareligious view of their religion. — baker

I agree, but this is a hard idea to keep hold of. If I stop paying attention, it slips away again. — T Clark

That is , any facet of a world taken as what it is ‘in itself’ implies not only a relation with an environment to define what ‘it’ is, but a relation that produces it uniquely , and only in that moment, and only from ‘its’ perspective in that moment — Joshs

Do you think a universe can persist if there is no observer/perspective? I know we can't imagine that world, but I guess my bigger question is, "what" is being outside perspective?

If you say, there is no "being" outside perspective, that is indeed Idealism and Schopenhauer would get on board with that. But, let's say you weren't an Idealist. Is there any other way to answer this? — schopenhauer1

'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.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy, p106

My feeling is that social media, email, text messages; the technology of the Internet and communications, discourages thought (and other things as well, such as prudence, consideration, patience). — Ciceronianus

That said, my understanding is that our metaphysics amounts to a collaboration between ourselves and what it is we describe as reality. We create the measuring systems, the tools, the very language of description. And as we learn or grasp more, our metaphysics shifts and evolves. — Tom Storm

others don't understand the issues, — Janus

Parmenides is, I fear, probably beyond my capability — Wayfarer

What say you? — Ciceronianus

I gave an example of a very complex system that emerged from many interacting subsystems with massive interconnection and where no non-physical explanation is needed. I think that is analogous to the mind arising from the nervous system. — T Clark

What then could constitute a metaphysic? — Janus

Yet humans at least act as though we have a privileged perspective to being close to what is “really going on”, more than other animals at least. Now take away humans, take away animals. We get a view from nowhere. Here is true metaphysics. What then exists in the view from nowhere? — schopenhauer1

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

devices using transistors — T Clark

I don't see any need to hypothesize some sort of non-physical process — T Clark

Talking about words and groups the word sociolect is one to know. — trogdor

And which threads do you think ought not be on the forum? — Banno

It boggles the mind to think that the leadership is so into their groupthink.... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Russian soldiers kept women in a basement for 25 days; nine are now said to be pregnant.

London: War crimes investigators have uncovered horrific cases of sexual violence committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, including women and girls kept in a Bucha basement for 25 days. Ukraine’s official ombudsman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, says nine of them are now pregnant.

Denisova said she had recorded multiple cases of rape, torture and abuse by Kremlin forces in Bucha, outside Kyiv, and in other Ukrainian towns as the full extent of the Russian brutality spurred calls for President Vladimir Putin to be charged with crimes against humanity. — SMH

There are peaks and valleys, and, by and by, loftier peaks and not-so-deathly valleys. — ZzzoneiroCosm