• Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    ↪180 Proof
    Why do I feel the only reason you asked me the question is to debunk whatever response I came up with? I won't waste my time in future.
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" — 180 Proof

    From what I understand, neuroscience has no idea of how the natural brain with natural capacities experiences the taste of vanilla.

    What I'm saying is, there is abundant documentary evidence and witness testimony for the experience of such states of being, but I'm not going to waste any time trying to convince you of that.
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof

    We have in our culture a very rigid barrier between natural and supernatural. It is mainly constructed due to the cultural dynamics surrounding early modern science. I once read a document about the formation of the Royal Society, as you know the first properly scientific body in the world. It explicitly said words to the effect of 'no metaphysics! Keep out of anything that is the business of the priesthood!' And you can understand why. At the time, Europe was convulsed with religious wars, Britain herself had the many religious conflicts between Church and Throne. Natural philosophers found it prudent to keep a strict separation between their investigations of 'the movements of bodies' and the kinds of questions which occupied the priesthood and the scholastic philosophers. And also, as you're well aware, there were dreadful penalties placed on deviation from orthodoxy, which literally means 'right belief', from the beginning of Christian culture. So that, I think, is where this firewall between natural and supernatural, in a political and cultural sense, can be traced back to.

    Christianity itself is grounded on supernatural stories, that being the resurrection of Jesus, and the accounts of the miracles in the Gospel. It was a requirement to believe these as fact - not as symbolic or metaphor, and not as something explain rationalistically or 'work out' The Gospel was 'foolishness to the Greeks', i.e. confounded the Greek philosophers (hence the deep-seated tension in Christianity between Gospel and philosophy.) That is what I think has given rise to the deep division in western culture between religious and secular culture.

    But as @Tom Storm says, there there are voluminous testimonies of religious and mystical experience and realisation from every culture and every period of history, of phenomena and experiences outside the bounds set by this division in Western culture. Even the scientific world-picture is moving away from old-school materialism and the idea of the human as a gene machine. Have a look at The Neural Buddhists, an old OP by David Brooks.

    I think there is, in a very broad sense, such a thing as religious naturalism. That is not 'religion within the bounds of currently-defined scientific knowledge' but arising from the experiences, practices and traditional lore of cultures other than Western that has developed over millenia, from sources including India, China, and Persia, to mention only a few. There are vast domains of understanding in those cultures which are not characterised by the same implicit divisions between nature and what is purportedly above or beyond it, that we in the West have absorbed.

    Also, closer to the OP, Dermot Moran has a book on the mystical theologian and neoplatonist Duns Scotus Eriugena, in which he traces his influence on the development of German idealism via Echkardt and medieval mysticism. Also I've noticed a book mentioned in a few of these debates on Hegel as an Hermetic philosopher (Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Hermetic-Tradition-Glenn-Alexander/dp/0801474507)
  • Hegel and the Understanding of Divine/Supernatural Experiences
    You seem to begin with an assumption there is a supernatural or divine. — Tom Storm

    Whereas, the general consensus on this forum is that any claims of religious revelation or accounts of the divine arising from religious or mystical traditions generally should be disregarded as valid sources of knowledge and/or information and should be put to one side. Would you agree with that?

    for the most part, traditional dialectics, by their very nature, start with the assumption that one side is right and one side is wrong. — ClayG

    I don't know if that is really correct. Dialectic has always comprised a dialogue between opposing points of view, but part of the point of dialectic is that in this exchange an understanding emerges from the tension between them which may not be disclosed without there being this opposition. But, that said, overall I agree with your analysis of the value of Hegel's dialectical approach for the evaluation of religious ideas.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    ↪Art48
    The majority will never accept that there is the kind of state of self-realisation or higher knowledge that the Advaitins are speaking of, as it has no reference points in modern philosophy or Western culture generally. Explore it by all means but don't waste your time trying to convince anyone else that it's real.
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    :up:
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    But qualia are slippery eels. — plaque flag

    I've noticed that the term is only ever used in discussions connected to a particular clique of American academic philosophers - the usual suspects of Dennett/Churchlands/Rosenberg - who, I think, introduced it to be able to argue the case on their own terms in terms of an obscure piece of specialised jargon. (You would never encounter it in daily speech, or general literature.)

    But the way to simplify it, is to think of it simply as 'quality' - being or consciousness has a qualitative dimension (Chalmer's awkward phrase 'what-it-is-like-ness'). This brings to mind the book Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M Pirsig, which has a lot to say about 'the metaphysics of quality'. I asked our friendly bot to summarize that for us:

    In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig distinguishes between two modes of understanding the world: the classic and the romantic. The classic mode of understanding is based on the rational and analytical approach of traditional philosophy, while the romantic mode is based on intuition and direct experience. According to Pirsig, these two modes of understanding are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, and he believes that they can be integrated through a metaphysics of quality.

    Pirsig sees quality as a kind of objective reality that is independent of subjective perceptions or preferences, and that is inherent in all things. He believes that the pursuit of quality is what gives meaning and purpose to human existence, and that it is the key to a fulfilling and satisfying life. The metaphysics of quality that Pirsig proposes is an attempt to reconcile the classical and romantic modes of understanding by recognizing the importance of both reason and intuition in the pursuit of quality.     — ChatGPT

    Now, notice how this stands against David Hume's original formulation of the 'is/ought problem' which articulates the problem of how to derive the qualitative 'ought' from the quantitative 'is'. And around that, revolves one of the principle problems of modern ethics. This is the tip of a large iceberg so I won't elaborate it here.
  • Why the Hard Problem is so Relevant to Axiology and Ethics
    The nexus between an object being bombarded by effects of the universe and and an object being bombarded by effects that matters is consciousness. — schopenhauer1

    I've been attending a couple of online Q&A's by Evan Thompson, who's a philosopher and phenomenologist, one of the co-authors of the influential book The Embodied Mind. He is exploring 'biopsychism' - the question of whether all life is sentient. One of his other books is Mind in Life.

    He has a paper suggesting that qualia - broadly speaking, knowledge of good and bad - comes into existence with any form of living organism. There's nothing good or bad in chemistry or physics - stuff just happens. But as soon as there's a living organism, even the most rudimentary, then that organism has to navigate away from what harms and towards what helps. So the emergence of sentient life-forms is the emergence of a dimension of being that is not possible in the inorganic domain.

    The video is here. The paper is linked in the description. (Yet another hour-long youtube video, of which there are now millions :yikes: )
  • Philosophical implications of contacting higher intelligences through AI-powered communication tools
    If humanity does make contact with a higher intelligence, through the use of AI-powered communication tools, what sort of philosophical implications does that have for humanity? — Bret Bernhoft

    I can see that being a real rabbit hole. I'm no AI sceptic, I've followed it on this forum and on the Internet, but when you introduce ideas such as 'higher intelligence' and cosmic forces, it's an idea ripe for conspiracy-theory memes.

    We discussed the case of Blake LeMoine on this forum last year. He was the Google engineer who was convinced that his bot had attained sentience, and was ultimately sacked as a consequence. I mean, I can understand his p.o.v. because these systems really do seem uncannily sentient, but I resist his conclusions about it.

    I run this query through ChatGPT quite frequently, and it usually responds like this:

    Q: Are systems like ChatGPT sentient life-forms?

    A: No, systems like ChatGPT are not sentient life-forms. While they are designed to mimic human language and respond to input in a conversational manner, they do not possess consciousness or self-awareness. ChatGPT is a machine learning model that uses algorithms to analyze and process language data, and its responses are generated based on patterns and probabilities learned from the input it has been trained on. It does not have subjective experiences, emotions, or the ability to make decisions based on its own desires or goals.     — ChatGPT

    There are going to be many enormous consequences of AI in the very near future, let's not introduce imponderable questions such as higher intelligences into the equation. :yikes:
  • Zizek's view on consciousness - serious or bananas?
    Brains model worlds. In order to construct an “objective” view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully “other” itself as the “subjective” part of that viewing. — apokrisis

    This starts with the very first organism, doesn't it? I mean, it won't *know* that in the sense that humans do (not having a brain) - but the differentiation of self from other is fundamental to organic life, is it not? What's within, and outside, the membrane?
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    The self is the ground of experience, but it has no objective reality.

    Buddhist philosophy is well known for denying the reality of self, which is the principle of anatta (literally, 'no-self'). But if you drill down on it, the Buddha doesn't deny that the self exists - when asked whether it exists, he declines to answer, later explaining that both the positive and negative responses to the question are misleading. Beyond that, wondering about the self - who am I, where did I come from, what will happen to me, and so on - are discouraged as forms of self-seeking or egocentrism.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    The contents of human minds are Ideal (in the sense of subjective concepts), and everything else is more or less Real. From that perspective Universals are merely memes in human minds. Whether they exist elsewhere is debatable. But we like to think that mathematical Principles and physical Laws are somehow Real, since evidence for them is found consistently in Nature. :smile: — Gnomon

    To me, that is the major subject of philosophy. It is the domain of the a priori, but it's not as if there's evidence for them, so much as that we rely on them to decide what constitutes evidence.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    Practically speaking, realists are those who believe realpolitik and scientific rationalism.

    The world, through us, comes to make its own nature or character more and more explicit. It comes to know itself. We are god's spies, god's eyes, god's authors. — plaque flag

    That's nearer to what I'm on about. Note the convergences with (neo)advaita and the like. There's an academic, Robert M. Wallace, who has written on Hegel's philosophy of religion, see this.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    OK, but I don't believe the idea is that consciousness is like a mirror which reflects physical, emotional, and mental sensations but is unaffected by them is inextricably connected to anything. The idea happens to occur in Vedanta but it's an idea that anyone, East or West, might believe or, at least, find interesting. — Art48

    I do find it compelling. I first came across Vedanta when I was about 20, a share house I was in had a pamphlet on the teaching of Ramana Maharishi, who is as well-known Advaitin as you're ever likely to read about. Leafing through that little book, I thought 'wow this is fantastic. Why isn't everyone taught this at school?' It seemed so simple - meditation on the question 'who am I?' leads to a realisation of your real nature as being beyond time, space and suffering. I still think Ramana's teaching ought to be better known in the West. (But I was soon to learn, there was a lot more to it than simply closing your eyes and meditating 'who am I?')
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    ↪Art48
    It's more that, the approach of saying there is some vital truth presented in something like Advaita Vedanta - let's take that as scientific fact, leaving behind the religious faity tales. But what if that vital truth is inextricably connected to the religious element in the tradition? I mean, Hinduism has plenty of tales - it is after polytheistic, with a plethora of divas and a grand tradition of religious drama. Wanting to extract 'the good bits' from that, and leave behind the cultural accretions, may distort the understanding of what actually is at issue.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    If so, I don’t care. — Art48

    Plainly.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ...Wittgenstein... — plaque flag

    I think Wittgenstein was nominalist, through and through. In other words, universals could have, for him, no reality aside from their usage in language (which is exactly what nominalism means). The revisitionist perspective on realism that I'm trying to articulate is that universals can be interpreted more broadly as scientific principles, arithmetic proofs, and logical laws, and that these are not dependent on our conventions of speech. They are independent of your or my mind, but can only be discerned by the mind; they're intelligible objects, in the sense intended by objective idealism. (Note that in saying that, they're not actually "objects" at all, except for in a metaphorical sense; they're more like the constituents of reason, structures or ideas but they are invariant for different observers. The problem is, designating them as objects invariably leads to the question of where they are, as objects must be located somewhere. That culminates in the discussion of the 'ethereal platonic realm', which is a dead end, an analogy for Descartes 'thinking thing', another dead end. All of that arises from the tendency to objectify, to treat reality as if it comprises solely the interaction of objects.)

    But Wittgenstein, of course, will reject all this on account of its proximity to classical metaphysics, 'language on holiday'. That is because, I say, there is a normative dimension that had collapsed in Western philosophy which provided for different levels of modes of being, other than the sensory, which was lost with the rejection of realism.
  • A life without wants
    Carefree, I would say.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    Hegel always says too much.
  • Christians Should Question their Beliefs
    ↪Katiee
    Hi Katiee, and welcome to the Forum.

    I would say, honest doubt and wrestling with doubt is an integral part of any mature faith. If you're at all familiar with Aquinas (I hasten to add, I'm no scholar of Aquinas!) you will notice nearly all his arguments begin with objections and their patient rebuttals. This is part of the dialectical approach to faith which is rather sadly absent in much of the debate around these matters.

    So - I agree with you, I think honest questioning is definitely an important part of spiritual growth. The other thing to consider is that there are some very learned philosophers in the Catholic tradition, people like Stephen M Barr and Robert Spitzer SJ who have written a lot on questions of faith and science in the modern age. That's one thing the Catholic faith has in spades. There are also some really interesting youtube channels on faith, philosophy, science and religion nowadays.

    So I think you're in a good place, and you're asking questions definitely worth asking.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪plaque flag
    As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).

    That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort.     — Ed Feser
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    The whole problem arises from the sense of 'otherness', the barely articulated sense of the separation of the self and the world. That is an inevitable consequence of the philosophy of the individual, the hallmark of modernity. It's interesting if you google the term 'the union of knower and known', which is generally considered a characteristic expression of mysticism - most of the top hits refer to Thomism, but there are some from Islamic philosophy, also.

    I think something like that was probably also found in Hegel, and the other German idealists. Nowadays it is mainly only preserved in Aristotelian Thomism.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪plaque flag
    in the world i.e. constituents of reality. 'The ligatures of reason', is how I put it.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    We drop 'mindindepent' as confusing. We grasp language in terms of embodied enacted social norms which are out there in the world as patterns in our doings. — plaque flag

    Not only 'our doings'.

    The fear of slipping into “vitalism” — the idea that living things are alive because of some non-physical vital force — arises only because we have so much difficulty reckoning with the presence of ideas in the world rather than merely in our heads. I mean potent, shaping ideas. After all, the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual. Yet we can reasonably say that such relations — for example, those given by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, representing Newton’s law of universal gravitation — in some sense govern material reality. The relations tell us, within the range of their practical applicability, something about the form of physical interactions. We do not try to make an additional, vital force out of the fact that a mathematical idea, as a principle of form, is “binding” upon an actual force. — Steve Talbott, Evolution and the Purposes of Life

    This is why I convinced of the reality of universals. But no, comes the invariable response, they're the products of the mind, conventions of language - what is 'out there' is real existing independently of any act of thought on our part.'
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    Ultimate ground of existence is a purely secular/philosophical idea as is the idea it can be directly experienced as uncreated light. — Art48

    I would question that. I think the attempt to distill this kind of understanding outside the philosophical-religious frameworks in which it was articulated often amounts to an act of cultural appropriation. It is too easily corrupted into a search for thrills or some form of vicarious self-fulfilment. The milieux in which these understandings are handed down - such as Advaita Vedanta, which your video was from - are highly regulated. Certainly in the 20th C and especially since the 1960's there have been those claiming to bring enlightenment back from the East and produce a domesticated versions of it, but I question how many of them are authentic. There are some, but the better ones have maintained a relationship with their source.

    You know what the etymology of 'Upaniṣad' is (the source texts of Vedanta)? It means 'sitting closely', indicating an understanding that was developed between guru and chela, often over many years of discipleship. It's true the Advaita often expresses a kind of dismissiveness of orthodox religion and rule-following - but then, so did Jesus. Vedanta is nevertheless pretty strict in terms of ethics, generally stressing vegetarianism, celibacy and abstentation.

    The general populace often isn't terribly interested in the truth, much less a direct encounter with it. Many scientists, however, are deeply interested in the truth. — Art48

    I would think very few are interested in Capital-T Truth, of the form described in terms of the Sanskrit Satya. Science has exploded into such vast domains of specialised knowledge that arriving at a synoptic vision of the Cosmos as a unified whole seems a distant hope. Most scientists are more interested in getting published (same as, most preachers are interested in getting more congregants.)
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪Gnomon
    Up until quite recently, 'realism' in philosophy meant 'realism with respect to universals' i.e. some form of Platonic or Aristotelian realism. Today's realism, 'realism with respect to mind-independent objects of perception', is a very recent arrival.
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    One reason I like the above line of thought is that I find it so much more satisfying, intellectually and philosophically, than, to be blank, religion’s fairy tales. And I think it may even be a true and accurate picture of reality. — Art48

    You will find nearly all these accounts presented in the context of religious cultures. There is a tradition of 'the uncreated light' in Eastern Orthodoxy also, and even in Buddhism there is a reference to the 'luminous mind'. There's an SEP entry on 'divine illumination' referring back to Augustine. So the degree you can disentangle it from 'religious fairy tales' and still keep the gist of it is dubious. Within those traditions, those who seek to encounter the source of the 'uncreated light' are generally ascetics, renunciates and contemplatives. The 'fairy tales' you refer to are mythological and symbolic means to convey religious maxims to a general audience, the vast majority of whom won't be monks or mystics.

    (The comparison with 'energy' is misplaced, because, unless it is directed, energy always flows in the direction indicated by the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. to greater and greater disorder. It possesses no intrinsic intelligence.)
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    Why not there like a dance is there ? — plaque flag

    Why not indeed? Have you encountered that book, Incomplete Nature? It's been discussed here a bit over the years. Cheatsheet here. Next on my list.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    It's not that the difficulty of locating consciousness among the neuro-signaling forces us to look for it in something else--that is, in some other sort of special substrate or ineffable ether or extra-physical realm. The anti-materialist claim is compatible with another, quite materially grounded approach. Like meanings and purposes, consciousness may not be something 'there' in any typical sense of being materially or energetically embodied, and yet may still be materially causally relevant. — Terence Deacon, Incomplete Nature

    Like numbers, and natural laws.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    :up: Thank you.
  • On Chomsky's annoying mysterianism.
    ↪Tom Storm
    Interesting, I hadn't thought of it like that. But I'm not really reading it as an attempt to convert. The context is Nagel's observation about how the idea of any kind of consonance between mind and world is strenuously resisted, as a consequence of it seeming to be too near to religion. He followed it up with Mind and Cosmos in 2012, which The Guardian named as one of the most despised books of that year. This, despite his own frequent profession of atheism. He says that the idea that the mind evolved as a consequence of mindless physical forces is self-contradictory and that there must be a teleological explanation for the existence of conscious beings. Nagel suggests that the emergence of conscious beings in the universe may be the result of an inherent tendency toward the development of consciousness and value. But again this is on the basis of philosophy, although of course as soon as the book came out it was described as 'providing aim and comfort to creationists'. Which is kind of the point I'm making.

    I had some experience when I was very young as a casualty wardsman in a Catholic hospital. The head nurse was a Sister Mary Louise, always immaculately turned out in crisp white and polished black shoes. She was a stern disciplinarian and indefatigible worker, but her compassion impressed me. There were often tragic scenes, it being an emergency ward, and I was hugely impressed by her ability to empathise and literally provide a shoulder to cry on and to weep with the patients, but then to return to her normal equilibrium and carry on with her day. (My wife had major surgery at that same hospital many decades later and again the sense of compassionate concern was palpable.)
  • On Chomsky's annoying mysterianism.
    Since the content of Nagel's article is off-topic, I won't discuss it further in this post. Except to say that it may indirectly suggest why some of us, frustrated by the inadequacies of Reductionism, Materialism, and Naturalism, have labeled the ultimate origins of Mind, Consciousness, and Language as a poetic mystery, instead of a topic for scientific analysis.: — Gnomon

    Agree with your analysis and glad you found that essay worthwhile. The bottom line is naturalism is essentially defined against what it denies: most obviously ‘the supernatural’. Which, in effect, is taken to mean religion - and not only that, but ideas associated with religion, which are a very broad palette of ideas. Nagel, commenting on Peirce’s platonist musings, says that Peirce’s idea of the ‘inward sympathy’ with nature is alarming to many people:

    The reason I call this view alarming is that it is hard to know what world picture to associate it with, and difficult to avoid the suspicion that the picture will be religious, or quasi-religious. Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.

    That is the preamble to the famous and frequently-quoted passage on the fear of religion:

    In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper--namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

    My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.     — Thomas Nagel

    I've observed it countless times in over 12 years of online debates of just these kinds of questions. There is an undercurrent, a kind of firewall, against such ideas as 'inward sympathy' or 'eternal verities' because they're associated with religion or at least with philosophical spirituality (which is the same thing for most people.)

    So, this is the sense that 'fear of religion' drives a good deal of philosophical discussion, including naturalism about the mind. That is why I introduced it: not out of ‘finger pointing’ but because it is a real and potent undercurrent in debates about mind and cosmos.

    Here Nagel turns to an analysis of the notion that reason itself has a naturalistic explanation, namely as a product of evolutionary adaptation - something which I’m sure nearly everyone accepts without questioning. It seems commonsense to say that ‘reason evolved in the service of survival’. He says, however, that

    Unless it [this analysis] is coupled with an independent basis for confidence in reason, the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening rather than reassuring. It is consistent with continued confidence only if it amounts to the hypothesis that evolution has led to the existence of creatures, namely us, with a capacity for reasoning in whose validity we can have much stronger confidence than would be warranted merely from its having come into existence in that way. I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct--not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so. But to believe that, I have to be justified independently in believing that they are correct. And this cannot be merely on the basis of my contingent psychological disposition, together with the hypothesis that it is the product of natural selection. I can have no justification for trusting a reasoning capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself -- that is, believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers. — Thomas Nagel

    So notice here that Nagel rejects the idea that the faculty of reason can be seen as a product of adaptation - because to do so, is to undermine the sovereignty of reason. Which, one would hope, would be the last thing a philosopher would wish for.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    ↪T Clark
    The point he’s trying to make is that while cognitive science is adequate for the explanation of the various functions of consciousness, it can’t show how to bridge the explanatory gap between those accounts and the felt nature of first-person experience. You could know all about the physiology of pain without knowing pain, which you only know by having had it. Elsewhere he writes about the possibility of developing a ‘first person science’ although I haven’t studied that. You’ll find a comprehensive set of papers here https://consc.net/consciousness/ But I will say he’s a very clear writer and thinker.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    The only reason I'm paranoid about this stuff is that it's very easy to "stack the deck" depending on what side you're on. — fdrake

    This debate is one of the fronts in the culture wars. On the one side, scientific materialism says that humans are gene machines or moist robots, that free will and even consciousness itself are illusory (notwithstanding that an illusion can only be an artefact within consciousness). It is no coincidence that in addition to his writings on philosophy Dennett is also one of the prominent 'new atheists' (alongside Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, although the new atheist fad is now seen as rather passé).

    On the other side, you have a number of writers and speakers from all kinds of backgrounds, with a great diversity of views. About the only thing they have in common is opposition to the materialist paradigm. You could include, amongst philosophers, Raymond Tallis, Mary Midgley, and Thomas Nagel. There are philosophers of cognitive science who straddle the border, such as Christof Koch, enactivists like Alva Noe, and the phenomenologists. Plus nowadays even the Vedic contingent, represented by Deepak Chopra. (Those Consciousness Studies conferences held by the University of Arizona must be pretty interesting. Check out the program for the next installment, in May this year.)
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    ↪Fooloso4
    It had seemed to me that you rejected attempts to understand consciousness from a scientific point of view. — T Clark

    Not at all. Neither does David Chalmers. Remember, Daniel Dennett is not a cognitive scientist, or actually a scientist at all. He's a philosopher who appeals to a scientific ideology in pursuit of a philosophical agenda.

    There are some cognitive science writers I'm wanting to read more of, notably Antonio D'Amasio, Thomas Metzinger, and Anil Seth. Not that I'm expecting to always agree with their philosophical stance, but there's a lot to learn in this space.
  • Are you receiving email notifications for private messages?
    ↪Jamal
    Are they common where you live? (I know it's completely disconnected to the thread, but anyway....)
  • Are you receiving email notifications for private messages?
    I first noticed them when I was still living at home with my folks. An invasive species in Australia. They’re super-smart, real scrappers, aggressive, who will generally prevail over everything in their ecological niche. At the last house I lived, there was an Australian native species with the homonym ‘miner’, a honeyeater, which were sufficiently prolific to keep the Indian Mynahs at bay. I’ve since moved out of the greater Sydney area and disappointingly they are quite prolific hereabouts. They bring down the neighbourhood.
  • Are you receiving email notifications for private messages?
    Send me a test message, I have it enabled.

    (Oh, and by the way, I hate Indian Mynahs :rage:
  • Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4
    ↪Pierre-Normand
    Um, that was March 9 this year, and it is very much happening just as they predicted. They pointed to the many recent studies about the deleterious consequences of social media, and said that now we’re at the point to check some of these influences before the same thing happens all over again, on a much vaster scale. I think it’s the fact that all these companies are trying to seize the commercial advantage and market dominance of being the next Google or Apple that will drive a lot of it - that’s what they mean by the AI arms race. And neither Government nor the legal framework has a ghost of a chance of catching up with what’s happening.

    The scenario of humans inventing a technology they can’t control and then being destroyed by it is a common theme in sci fi. I sometimes wonder, if it’s also the reason that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence never finds any.
  • On Chomsky's annoying mysterianism.
    in what sense is the argument I put forward about the differences in approach not itself a philosophical question — Isaac

    You said that you would create a questionnaire, consult students, and so on. I expect groups like Pew Research might have surveys on such questions (like this one.) That's the kind of thing psychologists do.

    I'm sure Nagel wouldn't speculate on the speed of light, or other questions of the kind, because they are questions for physics.

    What makes Thomas Nagel's book The Last Word a philosophy text? Well, Nagel is 'the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University,[3] where he taught from 1980 to 2016.[4] His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.[5]' (Wikipedia) He's written a number of books on philosophy in addition to The Last Word. He's one of the few academic philosophers who is well-known outside the academy.

    A fear of hard work. — Isaac

    Oh, so an ad hominem against philosophers, presumably, and Thomas Nagel, in particular. Too lazy to cut it as a psychologist. Obviously I'm outmatched by such rhetorical firepower.
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