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

Doesn't it? Not clear. Why not? — Constance

I don't see how, at the level of basic questions, anything can be posited that is not phenomena. — Constance

You can define 'machine' however you like. — Isaac

If you define a 'machine' as human-made... — Isaac

I think you must be referring to Heisenberg, not Heidegge — Janus

Of course, I'm looking for trouble bringing something like this up here. — Constance

I think the Tao Te Ching, as well as Kant and Heidegger, make statements that are, at least potentially, empirically verifiable. — T Clark

Conscious open brain surgery shows a connection between brain and experiences, thoughts, emotions, memories, but does not show generative causality. — Constance

Scientism is the belief that the scientific method is the best or only way to understand the world and solve problems. It is often associated with the belief that science can or should be applied to all areas of knowledge, including those that are traditionally outside the scope of science, such as morality and the meaning of life. Some people view scientism as a positive approach that can lead to new discoveries and insights, while others see it as a narrow-minded or reductionist way of thinking that oversimplifies complex issues. — ChatGPT

I studied Jung and Joseph Campbell for a year as an elective in the 1980's. — Tom Storm

Maybe there should be a thread as per Kasturp - why materialism is baloney. — Tom Storm

This primary goal originated when some purely unintentional (goalless) entities happened to have (by random strokes of luck).... — litewave

So, if you project that into the distance future, what do you think is emerging from the activity you describe. If we can assign meaning to the contents of the universe then then do we inherit the right to develop those contents in the way we choose to? If we gain the tech to be able to? — universeness

Avidya is a Sanskrit term that is often translated as "ignorance" or "delusion." In Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, avidya refers to a fundamental ignorance or misunderstanding of the nature of being. This ignorance is seen as the root cause of suffering and the source of suffering, because it leads us to see in a way that is not in accord with the way things really are. — ChatGPT

So are you saying that omniscience is one of the emerging goals that is a 'natural consequence' of being an entity which can demonstrate intent and purpose? — universeness

What turns living creatures into semiotic systems is their ability to interpret the world, and single cells, according to Markoš, have this ability because their behaviour is context-dependent. This is why even single cells are subjects, not objects, and this is why we recognize them as living creatures, not machines. — Marcello Barbieri, A Short History of Biosemiosis

My point is that collections of elementary particles are not just useful fictions but real things, — litewave

To what extent do you think that human beings are 'information processors?' — universeness

How much credence do you give to the idea that we are heading towards an 'information/technological singularity? — universeness

Wayfarer has already done this on our behalf. — ucarr

I often wonder just how much of what we believe is arrived at through such personal processes - some ideas seem to neatly complement our existing aesthetics and values. I find Husserl, such as I have read, engaging too. — Tom Storm

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it's empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering. — Thanissaro Bhikkhu, What is Emptiness

Given the limits of my understanding of phenomenology, it would be silly to take my statements as anything more than a first impression. — T Clark

As I noted in a previous post, they seem like psychology to me more than they do philosophy. — T Clark

How is it a question of meaning? It's about a theory of consciousness. — frank

Marjorie Taylor Greene: 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.' — NY Times

(McCarthy's) mistake was convincing himself that a party obsessed with dominance would reward submission.

between a science that recognizes that reality is inextricably tangled with human cognition and one that doesn't. — T Clark

I don't see how anything I've read here is inconsistent with the idea that the experience of consciousness is a manifestation of biological and neurological processes. — T Clark

What would recommend as Phenomenology for Dummies? — T Clark

Anyhow, is this a problem you recognize? Does the analysis make sense? What, if any, are potential solutions? — Baden

Upon thorough examination, the idea of a "self" is as arbitrary as the idea of a "chair", or any other object. In a purely material world, concepts like these simply don't exist. — tom111

It is a perennial philosophical reflection that if one looks deeply enough into oneself, one will discover not only one’s own essence, but also the essence of the universe. For as one is a part of the universe as is everything else, the basic substance of the universe flows through oneself as it flows through everything else. For that reason one can come into contact with the nature of the universe if one comes into substantial contact with one’s ultimate inner being.

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure...

From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are “just there.” We don’t question their existence; we view them as facts.

When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual things—this tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etcetera. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the “natural attitude” or the “natural theoretical attitude.” *

When Husserl uses the word “natural” to describe this attitude, he doesn’t mean that it is “good” (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an “everyday” or “ordinary” way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?

From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that “being” can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined.