The point I was making is that folk are bringing their views on god, society, spirituality, ontology, and even politics into the discussion. That's what messes it up. — Banno

[Adorno] argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating ‘cement’ of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism. Within a nihilistic world, moral beliefs and moral reasoning are held to have no ultimately rational authority: moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individual’s own prejudices. Morality is presented as thereby lacking any objective, public basis. — Morality and Nihilism

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard? — Banno

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

I won't deny that Kant has some very interesting theoretical observations, particularly concerning the relationship between things-in-themselves and experienced reality. — Manuel

It's easy to say they should not be denied their human rights, but the numbers are overwhelming. I'll bet your country doesn't have to deal with such an onslaught. Do you? — jgill

What in your view is the problem for which MWI is a solution?
— Wayfarer

Don't know how to answer this. — noAxioms

Well go on then, split the universe! :party: — Agent Smith

If, as is my understanding, there is no way to decide on a correct interpretation of QM empirically, it becomes not fantasy, but metaphysics. Or maybe just baloney. — T Clark

Q: You’ve written critically about the Many Worlds (or Everettian) Interpretation of quantum mechanics. What are its main shortcomings?

A: Its main shortcoming is simply this: The interpretation is completely contentless. I am not exaggerating or trying to be rhetorical. It is not that the interpretation is too hard to believe or too nonintuitive or too outlandish for physicists to handle the truth (remember the movie A Few Good Men?) It is just that the interpretation actually does not say anything whatsoever about reality. I say this despite all the fluff of the science-writing press and a few otherwise reputable physicists, like Sean Carroll, who seem to believe this vision of the world religiously.

For me, the most important point is that the interpretation depends upon no particular or actual detail of the mathematics of quantum theory. No detail that is, except possibly on an erroneous analysis of the meaning of “quantum measurement” introduced by John von Neumann in the 1930s, which is based on a reading of quantum states as if they are states of reality. Some interpretations of quantum theory, such as the one known as QBism, reject that analysis.

Q: So your position is that the Many Worlds Interpretation isn’t useful because it doesn’t constrain our theories of physics?

A: Allow me to get a bit technical to try to get the point across: Would Many Worlds work if quantum mechanics were based on real vector spaces instead of on complex ones? I would say yes. Would it also work if quantum mechanics used a different product structure than the tensor product? Yes. Would it work if quantum mechanics were nonunitary, i.e., didn’t obey the Schroedinger equation? Yes. And so it goes. One could even have a Many Worlds Interpretation of classical physics — as David Wallace, one of the most careful philosophers of the Many Worlds interpretation, once reluctantly admitted in a conference I attended.

The Many Worlds Interpretation just boils down to this: Whenever a coin is tossed (or any process occurs) the world splits. But who would know the difference if that were not true? What does this vision have to do with any of the details of physics? — Qanta

Should we examine it in detail? — Banno

Jesus’ nonsense description of disease as caused by sin and demons, — Art48

Either Jesus is God or he isn’t. Either heaven/hell awaits us, or reincarnation. — Art48

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. — Albert Einstein

that the issue is about the self? I — Banno

Smith examines the concept of "religion" in the sense of "a systematic religious entity, conceptually identifiable and characterizing a distinct community". He concludes that it is a misleading term for both the practitioners and observers and it should be abandoned in favour of other concepts. The reasons for the objection are that the word 'religion' is "not definable" and its noun form ('religion' as opposed to the adjectival form 'religious') "distorts reality". Moreover, the term is unique to the Western civilization; there are no terms in the languages of other civilizations that correspond to it. Smith also notes that it "begets bigotry" and can "kill piety". He regards the term as having outlived its purpose — Wikipedia

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions.

What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements. This process of elaboration is one of philosophical or theological construction. Christian experience of the presence of God, for example, at least in the early days and again since the 13th-14th century rediscovery of the centrality of the divine love, is the sense of a greater, much more momentously important, much more profoundly loving, personal presence than that of one’s fellow humans. But that this higher presence is eternal, is omnipotent, is omniscient, is the creator of the universe, is infinite in goodness and love is not, because it cannot be, given in the experience itself. In sense perception we can see as far as our horizon but cannot see how much further the world stretches beyond it, and so likewise we can experience a high degree of goodness or of love but cannot experience that it reaches beyond this to infinity. That God has these infinite qualities, and likewise that God is a divine Trinity, can only be an inference, or a theory, or a supposedly revealed truth, but not an experienced fact.

... Perhaps our different theologies, both within the same religion and between different religions, are human maps of the infinite divine reality made in different projections, i.e. different conceptual systems. These all necessarily distort, since that infinite reality as it is in itself cannot be represented in our finite human terms. But perhaps all are equally useful in enabling us make our journey through life. — John Hick - Who or What is God?

The sensory is never treated as having a component absolutely independent of rational processes — Joshs

Bitboll is not entirely right in his thinking. — Constance

.didn’t S do the same thing with respect to Buddhist notions, as S accused Kant of doing with respect to the Greeks? — Mww

noumenon, plural noumena, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never penetrate to the noumenon. Man, however, is not altogether excluded from the noumenal because practical reason—i.e., the capacity for acting as a moral agent—makes no sense unless a noumenal world is postulated in which freedom, God, and immortality abide.

Consider, if you will, the one abiding thought that dominates my thinking: The world is phenomena. Once this is simply acknowledged, axiomatically so, then things fall into place. — Constance

I have heard of experiments using MRIs to correlate specific brain patterns with specific words. — T Clark

I'm not sure that addresses your questions about the problem of universals, and I'm not sure Kant comes down fully in either of the nominalist or realist camps. — Jamal

It's your view that they transcend human experience and are not somehow formed as a product of human experience, right? — Tom Storm

...we may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to, nor derives from them, in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined by nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual "I".' — The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy, Alfredo Ferrarin

Are there not more recent schools of thought (especially in postmodernism) that take apart reason and apriori logic and maths and ultimately argue these are just human frameworks that don't really operate as advertised as universal or absolutist truths (Imre Lakatos)? — Tom Storm

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — The World of Universals

I poked my head in to challenge Wayfarer’s scurrilous accusation. — Jamal

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) called fellow Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.) a “fraud” for fundraising off of his efforts to block Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from winning the position last week.

“Matt Gaetz is a fraud. Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week he sent out a fundraising email,” Mace said on CBS’s “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan. “What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions. — The Hill

Philosophical naturalism is the study of the window. — 180 Proof

I believe that the principal difference between Kant and Plato on this matter is that Plato believed that the human mind could have direct unmediated access to these independent intelligible objects (what Kant calls noumena), but Kant denied that the human mind could have any direct knowledge of the noumena. — Metaphysician Undercover