how would you characterize what my view is saying then? — Apustimelogist

As a muddle.

But you are presupposing that everything has to be explained in some kind of reduction — Apustimelogist

Nope. Just pointing out that physicalist explanations claim to do what you say they're not capable of doing. But then you go on to claim that this inability is itself an argument for physicalism, but that is incoherent.

I wonder if this is a different account of cynicism than wayfarer had in mind? — Tom Storm

Mine was more general. It's the sense in which Trump has jaded the entire political scene - the expecation that 'all politicians are liars anyway' (so what does it matter if Trump lies?), who's to say what is true, all the instutitions of government are basically malignant, the whole system is rotten so let's destroy it - those kinds of cynical tropes.

Hannah Arendt worried that the true impact of ideological propaganda is not that leaders succeed in convincing their citizens of some truth. She understood that when factual truths are denied and substituted for by lies, the result is "an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established." Such cynicism, Arendt argues, is the true goal of totalitarians: "The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

Only those who fully embrace cynicism are free to give their undying loyalty to a leader who promises to grant importance to the purposelessness of human life.

What Arendt shows in Origins of Totalitarianism is that movements are so dangerous and can be central elements of totalitarianism because they provide the psychological conditions for “total loyalty,” the kind of unquestioned loyalty Trump rightly understands himself to possess among his most faithful supporters, like Mitch McConnell. “Such loyalty,” she writes, “can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement.” — The Triumph of Cynicism

I also don't have to "live with" him like the Americans since I only have every limited exposure to him where it's even like entertainment to me. I guess these sum up why many Chinese have this filtered-image of him. — Hailey

Totally get that. Where I am in the ‘Anglosphere’ (I’m not American but have immediate family in America) coverage of Trump has dominated the news for the last seven years, ever since it became evident that his Presidential run wasn’t just a publicity gimmick. It was very disappointing when he won the election, and I think overall his Presidency and presence have been very negative factors in public life. But thank you for your openness to other perspectives.

There’s no absolution to be found in ignorance.

Reasonable questions but is it apathy and cynicism from supporters? — Tom Storm

Apathy in respect of the facts - like, they don't care what he's been shown to have done, they won't watch or read the reports, and if they do, they will re-intepret them to suit their narrative - like, Trump is now saying that Jan6th was 'a beautiful day' and all the trouble was due to 'radical leftists' and 'government trolls'. And they'll lap it up. Not 'apathy' as in being emotionally inert.

2. He (Trump) really seems to put the country's interest first, not his personal interest. — Hailey

I don't know where you got the basis for this opinion, but it is not correct. Trump has always put his own interest first, before party, people, the Constitution, or any other interest. When he was a businessman, it was well-known that he often would not pay bills to tradespeople that worked on his building projects. He is well-known for discarding any of his allies and connections for perceived slights to his ego. He is under indictment even now for putting his own interest over the Constitution in the January 6th conspiracy and riot. I think you're probably getting a very filtered view of Trump.


(In case you can't access that link, it says, in part: 'Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will "protect your job." But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.

At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.

Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.' USA Today June 16 2016 updated 2018.)

What I think you're struggling with is, how to think of anything in non-physical terms. You want to equate 'what is real' with 'the physical' but at the same time, you recognise that there are things about mind, language, life, etc, that can't be explained solely in physical terms. But you want that alternative not to be given in terms of traditional metaphysics as that is equated with outmoded ways of thinking. That's what I think you're grappling with.

For argument's sake, I solicited a summary of Deacon's idea of 'incomplete nature' from ChatGPT:

In his book "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter," Deacon argues that there are certain fundamental aspects of life and cognition that cannot be fully explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. He contends that there are specific properties and phenomena associated with life and mind, such as purpose, meaning, and consciousness, that cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the physical and chemical properties of the underlying components.

Deacon suggests that nature is "incomplete" in the sense that it contains a fundamental absence or lack of something that needs to be accounted for in our scientific understanding. He argues that there are emergent properties in complex systems that cannot be predicted or explained solely by examining the components at a lower level of organization. Instead, these emergent properties require a different kind of explanation, one that considers the organization and relationships within the system as a whole.

Deacon's ideas on incompleteness challenge reductionist approaches to understanding life and cognition and call for a more holistic and integrative perspective that takes into account the unique features of complex systems. His work has generated considerable discussion and debate in the fields of biology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, as it challenges conventional notions of causality and reductionism in science.

I would say, rather than nature being incomplete, that it's naturalism as currently understood that is incomplete. (But then if he called his book Incomplete Naturalism, probably nobody would have looked at it ;-) )So, it's a critique of naturalism insofar as that is reductionist. Perhaps you could say he's wanting to extend the scope of naturalism beyond the fundamental physical categories that hitherto have defined it.

I think you are also but you must admit, it needs considerable elaboration before it becomes a coherent idea. :wink:

But if the reason something cannot be explained is not about ontology but about limits in explanation then I don't think that is an argument against physicalism. — Apustimelogist

But the whole point of physicalism *is* to explain something in physical terms. Otherwise it's not 'an explanation'. So if you're saying, it's physical in principle, but can't actually be explained by physicalism, then you're not offering a defense of physicalism, beyond saying that you hope or believe it is true. It's like what Popper calls 'promisory materialism'.

I'm just thinking this through... — Mark Nyquist

I appreciate that, I can see you're wrestling with the problem. You mentioned here or some other thread you don't much like reading philosophy, but I think you're going to have to do some more research on it (although nowadays video and audio materials are viable options to reading).

Have you run across Terence Deacon? He's mentioned from time to time on this forum.

But

the non-physical comes in at a secondary level. — Mark Nyquist

is in conflict with

It really is that the non-physical drives the physical. — Mark Nyquist

Well, the ability to materialize and the suggestion of 'other dimensions' which is what puts these claims in the category of occultism. Maybe I should revisit Carl Jung's book on it.

Although I have questions too regarding this, if ideas exist a priori than wouldn’t this point to genetic markers passed down through millennia ?

An example of this exists in some birds whose chicks are immediately scared upon seeing a certain shape in the sky meant to represent an eagle. — simplyG

Very interesting questions. I think the naturalist response is that there is no need to introduce anything like the philosophical a priori to account for instinctive animal behaviours - that these can be explained in purely natural terms as behaviours that have evolved over millions of years of natural selection. But there are some very interesting lines of inquiry in that area if you study it deeply. After all, most of modern biological nomenclature and classificatory science began with Aristotle, refined and elaborated considerably, but the vestige of Plato's forms is still visible to the discerning eye, I would think. This is where philosophy of biology is a very fascinating field of study.

it might just be required that a physicalist believes everything is physical. — Apustimelogist

We need to get clear on what 'physicalist' and 'physical' mean. Basically 'physicalism' or 'physicalist reductionism' asserts that the only ultimately-existing things are physical in nature, and that higher-level functions such as mind and organic life emerge from or supervene on the physical.

One of the basic assumptions of physicalism is that what is real, apart from being physical, is also completely describable in objective terms. The representative physicalist is Daniel Dennett - indeed, it was his kind of argument that David Chalmers had in his sights. And Dennett says

In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science.'

So, if there are 'good reasons that they cannot be' explained like that, as you say, then you're actually questioning physicalism, not the argument against physicalism.

Maybe we are what its like to be physical things.. we just can't explain it or describe properly the relation. — Apustimelogist

And that is actually nearer to the outlier philosophy called 'mysterianism'.

but a physicalist could just say that his experiences are his brain. — Apustimelogist

But a physicalist doesn't say that. A physicalist says that experience can be described wholly and solely in physical terms. To that extent, yours is a straw man argument - you're misrepresenting the argument that you're wanting to criticize.

There was a segment on last night's Media Watch about a respected Australian journalist, Ross Coulthart, who has gone all-in on the testimony of a UFO whistleblower, David Grusch. Grusch has made sensational claims that the US has, and is concealing, actual alien technology and even bodily remains. Grusch invariably deflects questions about his actual first-hand sighting of these, saying either that he's relying on other's testimony, or that he can't answer because it's classified. But one answer I did notice, was Coulthart saying that UFO's travel 'from another dimension'. Presumably, they can kind of materialise or de-materialise. (Which makes you wonder, as one of Grusch's congressional questioners asked, why they could be careless or incompetent enough to leave anything behind for the US Airforce to peruse.) I personally try to be open-minded, but I have to say I am extremely sceptical about this guy's testimony, short of actual proof.

Our brains don't even depend or the subject matter being physical or non-physical. Both are handled with the same physical process and biology. — Mark Nyquist

Tell you a big difference between physical and biological processes.

Physical processes don't rely on context. The equations of physics treat objects as idealised entities, which act in accordance with the laws of motion, disregarding external or extraneous factors, including goals, intentionality, and so on. (Of course, this has been called into question by the observer problem in quantum physics, in which the way the experimenter sets up the experiment will have a role in what is observed, but that can be left aside.)

Organisms, however, are completely different to that. Whereas the motions of physical objects are fully determined by physical laws, the processes involved in biology are described in terms that go far beyond the language of physics and chemistry. Words like “stimulus”, “response”, “signal”, “adapt”, “inherit”, and “communicate” are routinely used, not only for organisms, but also for organic molecules. And all of it takes place in a context, namely, 'the environment', which can be simply disregarded as far as classical physics is concerned.

The allure of physical reductionism is precisely that we can apply the kind of certainty that physics exhibits across the whole range of phenomena, living things included, leaving no ambiguity and allowing for the complete prediction and control we can obtain in physical systems. That is what physicalism means. But right from the outset, organic life introduces degrees of complexity and kinds of organisation that are completely outside the scope of physics as such. Believing that it can all be explained by physics or in physical terms is one of the reigning myths of today's culture. But that's all it is.

From Bernardo Kastrup:

If you are sad – very sad inside, to the point of despair – and you look at yourself in the mirror, you may be crying. So you will see tears flowing down your face and contorted muscles, but not for a moment would you think that those tears and contorted muscles are the whole story. You know that behind those tears, there is the thing in itself – the real thing – which is your sadness. So the tears and the muscles are the extrinsic appearance, the representation of an inner reality.

But that reality is not in another world. It’s right here. From a first-person point of view, it is the thing in itself – the sadness in itself – but it presents itself to observation as what we call ‘tears’.

This analogy can be extended to all manner of experiences. So every experience is, in some sense, a wave of neural activity, and also sensory stimulation, memory, anticipation, and many other factors. Each of those factors is, from one perspective, physical, comprising sensory and neural reactions. But what the experience is, can only be understood first-person, as an experience, not as the third-person observation of neuro- and physiological data.

I think we can then question the effectiveness of the main argument against physicalism because it assumes that our experiences should be reducible to information about the brain. — Apustimelogist

But your whole OP actually questions reductionism. You ask:

why would I expect such a representation to be reducible to the brain activity that supports it? — Apustimelogist

Isn't that just what reductionism is arguing for? It's physicalism which argues that experience is nothing but neural goings-on. So the very fact that experience is irreducible to physicalism, is not a counter-argument, but a re-affirmation of the argument.

Oh, and welcome to the Forum.

What reputation? — Changeling

The reputation that someone who has risen to President of the United States is supposed to have.Trump has already brought disgrace to the office, and a criminal conviction, should it follow, will put an official seal on that. Not that he will ever feel anything but wronged, as he has no shame.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the way Trump exploits the charges against him for political gain is morally abhorrent. I mean, here he is, facing very serious criminal charges which could see him jailed and his reputation destroyed, but he’s perfectly willing to exploit that by depicting the charges as ‘unjust persecution’ and then asking his supporters for money. And then grinning about it on the media: ‘see how clever I am?’

So the question is: how do you explain how deeply corrupt and perverted this is to those who see nothing wrong with it? Can you explain it? Or has an electorate that is willing to applaud it become corrupted past the point of redemption? This is what makes the Trump candidacy (should it be realised) so utterly malignant - the fact that he can rely on the apathy and cynicism of his supporters to gain ground by wholly illegitimate means.

Those remarks were scripted by Trump’s advisors after widespread backlash against his earlier comments about the Charlottesville riots which said ‘there were fine people on both sides’. It was wholly and solely a damage control exercise by his political apparatchiks, although of course you’ll swallow it at face value.

You seen Contact? That's one pretty amazing attempt to explain what it would be like. Geez, even Close Encounters, and 2001: Space Odyssey have a go at it. One of the reasons I love a good sci fi film, although there's also a lot of trashy sci fi.

But, on a more serious note, I think the only plausible explanation for interstellar visitors, is they find some way to get here without actually travelling the distance. They dissappear there and turn up here. How that would be done, of course, is completely unknown to us. But I don't believe in interstellar travel, as I said, the distances are just too great to traverse with actual physical vehicles.

PBS SpaceTime has a good video on the logistics of interstellar craft. 'We don't see aliens because intestellar travel is just too hard.'

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' ~ Arthur C Clarke - especially true of the application of quantum physics, because nobody really understands how it works. So maybe there's something as far ahead of quantum physics as we are ahead of the technology of the ancient world.

Are you claiming that QM would have been impossible to understand for the Greek atomists using nothing but their language and concepts? — RogueAI

I'm sure. I mean, we'll never know, but how would someone transported between two completely different epochs respond? I don't think they would be able to cope. You'd have to break their whole worldview right down and build it up again from scratch. Einstein had trouble coping with quantum physics.

Nobody would have been able to guess what, say, quantum theory would turn out like, prior to the pioneers actually doing the investigations and devising the math. A whole new conceptual vocabulary had to be developed along the way. And it was exceedingly difficult. Werner Heisenberg said he was reduced to tears in some of his dialogues/debates with Neils Bohr. Bohr and Einstein debated for 40 years and never really saw eye-to-eye. When you're dealing outer limits of understanding, it would be impossible to break it down in such a way that the untrained could fathom it.

Which country/government are you referring to? Here in Australia, the Government would never tell you what to think. It might be different in China or Russia and its vassal states, for instance.

although it's probably worth mentioning another initiative Avi Loeb is involved with - the Breakthrough Starshot project founded by Yuri Milner. The Starshot concept envisions launching a "mothership" carrying about a thousand tiny spacecraft (a 'swarm', each one on the scale of centimeters) to a high-altitude Earth orbit for deployment. After deployment a phased array of ground-based lasers would focus a light beam on the crafts' sails to accelerate them one by one to the target speed within 10 minutes, with an average acceleration on the order of 100 km/s2 (10,000 ɡ), and an illumination energy on the order of 1 TJ delivered to each sail. A preliminary sail model is suggested to have a surface area of 4 m × 4 m develop a proof-of-concept fleet of light sail interstellar probes named Starchip to be capable of making the journey to the Alpha Centauri star system 4.37 light-years away. The chips that the sails are carrying will only weigh a few grams.

Breakthrough Starshot was founded in 2016 by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and Mark Zuckerberg. Avi Loeb chairs an advisory board. See the wikipedia entry for more details; current news wrap here.

I've watched a few scientifically-informed presentations on interstellar travel, and the figures involved - the amount of energy that has to be used, the threat of radiation in deep space, and above all the immense distances involved - seem to rule it out. I mean, aside from 'faster than light travel' which I'm sure is not possible as a matter of principle, you simply can't bridge gaps of 10's or 100's or 1000's of light-years in any meaningful time-frame. I'm of the view that terrestrial organisms such as ourselves are inexorably earth-bound, and that although we might get boots on Mars - very big 'if'! - we'll never escape the bounds of the solar system. And there's no other planet that seems remotely habitable (even Mars would be an enormous stretch).

Although, thinking about it some more, I would concede that there may well be Government efforts to conceal facts from the public, under the guise of confidentiality, for their own reasons. The problem is that the whole subject of extraterrestrials does attract attention from conspiracy theorists and cranks (queue X Files theme music). And Avi Loeb is not really helping much, as he seems inordinately keen to have his ardent hope for the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence validated and highly dismissive of anyone who feels differently.

My interpretation of the meaning of Kant's philosophy, in this respect, is that space and time (or extension and duration) have an inextricably subjective dimension - both require a perspective to be meaningful. Otherwise, there can be no sense of scale - how near, how far, how long - without which the ideas of time and space are meaningless.

I might have pasted this in before, as I frequently refer to it. It's a Closer to Truth interview with Andrei Linde, who is one of the founders of the current model of cosmology. This particular interview is about the role of consciousness in the construction of space-time. I think it makes a similar point.

I’ve set a Google alert for ‘Avi Loeb Spherules’. I’m genuinely interested in finding out if the analysis proves they’re of extra-terrestrial, manufactured origin.

sorry, just fixed. — guanyun

No problems, and welcome.

The Debate on FoxNews had a hard time with the proverbial RATINGS. It was one of the lowest rated EVER, if not THE LOWEST. It showed that many of those participating are ‘second tier’ and merely ‘pretenders to the throne. — Trump, Truth Social

‘Pretenders to the throne’. Speaks volumes, don’t it.

Hi Tim - here's a rather good video presentation on the topic by Jim Baggott, whom I think is a respectable physics author and commentator. This was the presentation he gave at the launch of his latest book, and has a graphic overview of the inequality experiments. (I've attempted to queue the video to the start of the preceeding section which explains the context).



Helped me understand it!

Please read the help article on how to quote properly. Basically, use 'quote' tags not 'code' tags.

you should be willing to entertain the thought that your government is trying to deceive you — Tzeentch

I don’t buy any of that conspiracy theory stuff. Governments can barely organise the quotidian things they’re supposed to organise, let alone conspiracies to deceive. That is the province of internet trolls and fringe media and I have zero interest in any of it (or in arguing about it, so don’t bother.)

One of the uncanny things about the various pilot reports on UAPs is the way they accelerate from nothing to extremely fast in an instant without leaving a trail or sonic boom. It does seem like some form of visual illusion but some of the reports seem to have a kind of first-person veracity, these guys really did see something. I have an open mind about it, I’m prepared to accept it if any actual evidence comes to light that isn’t classified top secret - but so far…..

I think the secret is, with philosophy, to find a golden thread through the labyrinth - some over-arching theme which you can follow through all the various authors and periods. There has to be something which really grabs you in all the sea of books and authors. Oh, and I think Magee is really good on Schopenhauer, there are some passages I frequently quote from that book. Magee, who was an esteemed commentator and presenter, held Schopenhauer in the highest esteem.

My take has always been that if there are interstellar visitors, they can’t have gotten here by any known physical means. They would have to be able to traverse the distances involved in some way other than literally travelling from there to here - something which would appear to us as supernatural, but which would in reality be a form of science unknown and probably inconceivable to humans. Otherwise the time involved, and the exposure to interstellar radiation, would be just too great to be feasible. (You encounter these kinds of ideas in sci fi, but then, the topic lends itself to that kind of speculation - like ‘wormholes’ or spacetime portals and the like. None of which seem remotely feasible in terms of current science.)