:up: This is a view of area where my parents built their home. But I don't call it the bush - it's too close to suburbia and cities, despite its lushness.

Do you think you are like this, or is my theory just generalisation? — Rob J Kennedy

Most people I know are not just disinterested in philosophy; many are mildly hostile about it, seeing it as pointless wankery which never arrives anywhere. Which, I must say, it often seems to be.

I think it probably takes a life event or a remarkable encounter with someone to awaken an interest - when we suddenly find that our worldview has been shaken by new perspectives. We can either shut this down or wonder some more about other things we may have missed in making sense of life. But equally a lot of philosophy seems to involve people making post hoc rationalisations for what they already believe - theism, idealism, materialism - often with a view to convincing and coercing others with their arguments

I think there are numerous ways philosophy might be of interest. Many people just pursue it as though it were a passionless game of logic, with no real connection to life. Others see it as mostly as a history of ideas. Others want to write manifestos. There are many different types: from the genuinely learned to the strident monomaniac.

When I was a kid living in Epping (a suburb of Sydney) there were corridors of bush (which I believe still mostly exist). I used to spend all day from breakfast to dinner from the age of about seven playing in the bush.

My family used to go on very primitive road trips to the outback (Nyngan, Bourke, Tilpa, Wilcannia, Broken Hill, Coonabarabran, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs, etc, etc.). — Janus

I had pretty much the same experience - growing up in the Dandenong ranges and off to places like Broken Hill for road trips. I still can't tell the difference. :wink:

I was going to say to That if I thought about it at all, I always took 'outback' to be more remote and often barren or dry, while 'bush' implies greenery and perhaps closer proximity to towns or cities. I suspect regular travellers in Australia probably don't use the terms much and are likely to be more precise in their descriptions, as in, going to 'the remote Kimberly' or 'far north Queensland'.

With the recent even of Luigi's murder charge it makes me wonder why he didn't try the other umpteen steps to change things. Was it not a swift enough move? Was there even hope for change if he took those steps? — GTTRPNK

Do we know what steps Luigi took and what, if anything, happened?

I think there's a view amongst many people that the corporate fat cats are fucking over the world and letting people die, whilst they are lawyered up and protected from responsibility and consequences. Killing a problematic CEO may seem an irresistible way to send a message.

The average human can’t explain his own experiences, so how would he be able to design equipment, to record what he doesn’t know how to find? — Mww

Nice!

Would it not depend on the issue? If it's about bike lanes, then never. What do you have in mind?

I'm not a philosopher, but it strikes me that the word philosophy is an umbrella term for a wide range of enterprises - some of these would, as per Deleuze, develop new ways of understanding or describing the world. It sounds like you prefer to see philosophy as a creative endeavor rather than one bound by methodologies and mechanistic reasoning.

People seem to pursue the approaches to philosophy that match their dispositions and experience, and these help to form a set of habitual approaches to making sense of the world. I like the idea of philosophy as a way of trying to "undermine" our own habits, but this necessarily suggests that philosophy might need to be different things for different people. What I often observe, including in my own reflections, is that philosophy can serve as a series of elaborate post hoc rationalizations constructed to validate one's affective relationships with the world.

I am just trying to understand if I can possibly record what goes through within us at every moment. — Ayush Jain

Not sure I understand your ideas here. Memory doesn't represent what happened to us or how we felt. The self is like mercury. What we think we experienced changes which each recollection and evolves, often imperceptibly. The idea of a correct recollection of an event seems wrong. There is how you felt in the moment, which is specific to everything that came immediately before and after. It continually evolves: seconds, minutes, days, weeks, years later. I can't see how your idea would be useful. Rather than nailing down a single meaning and reproducing it over time in an attempt at a kind of synthesis, it might be better to celebrate the multiple interpretations of any event and realize that all we can do is try to make sense of our environment.

I don’t know the difference between the bush and the outback. I use them interchangeably if I have to use them. But generally I talk about going to ‘the country.’

Bushmaster" is an ironic name for an Australian tank, isn't it? — Arcane Sandwich

I thought is was an amusing name - sounds more like a Chinese Swiss army knife knock off you might find at Kmart in a grubby blister pack for $4.99.

As we keep imagining and exploring, the universe unravels itself. In your day to day life, I don't think the black hole sitting in the center of our galaxy has any direct impact. you will be indifferent to its existence.
But its there now since somebody has observed it. If nobody would have, it might or might not have existed?

All of these thoughts intrigue me a lot. What do you think? — Ayush Jain

I have no real commitments either way here but it might also be said that the universe doesn't so much unravel itself as we co-create or even invent it. Everything we see and experience is subject to our cognitive apparatus, our arbitrary language and our frames of reference which may not (and in my view are unlikely to) map directly onto reality. 'Reality' itself is a human construct, the ultimately real, the foundation, the prime mover, whatever conceptual frame you wish to insert.

There's a whole thread on this here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14685/the-mind-created-world

:up: Yep. Thanks again for the reference.

Does he need to use those words? He is obviously responding to the famous criticism of it as I have outlined earlier. The following appears to be a clear response to the CI, stating almost identically the famous critique.

“The moral principle that it is one’s duty to speak the truth, if it were taken singly and
unconditionally, would make all society impossible. We have the proof of this in the very direct
consequences which have been drawn from this principle by a German philosopher, who goes so far as to affirm that to tell a falsehood to a murderer who asked us whether our friend, of whom he was in pursuit, had not taken refuge in our house, would be a crime.”

Yeah, I live in the centre of Melbourne's CBD. It seems quieter than Richmond or Fitzroy. Nice for walks and close to all kinds of expensive shit. I like Sydney - used to stay in Potts Point. lovely place. I quite like Brisbane, but like Alain, it's been 10 years since I was there. I like Canberra too - it feels like a university campus town.

Or a lad-led wank...

Great, thanks. Now there's a direct source for this.

Most Australians I know drink imported beers like Asahi or Corona.
— Tom Storm
You're in Melbourne, then. — Banno

Yes, I'm a black-clad wanker, like the rest

Yes, Coopers comes up a bit too.

Thanks. So Kant actually addresses this concern directly. :smile:

Christ, it's hard to read. What does it say...

Environmental issues are an important issue, indeed, but I think every country of the world should promote their national products. I — javi2541997

Well, amongst Australian national products are institutional racism and laziness - we don't need to promote these. I don't drink alcohol, but in the days when I did, I rarely drank beer or wine. I actually found that there was some marvellous Tasmanian made whisky. But for the most part, I supported Scotland (J&B) and Ireland (Jameson's). I was never a connoisseur.

Makes sense.

Lawson vs. Patterson was a part of the culture wars in the eighties. — Banno

I must have been away that day. :wink: What was the point of that fight? I was in the Keating versus Hawke stoush back then.

Out of curiosity, I read most of Lawson's stories and a few Patterson pieces when I was a voracious reader in the 1980's but then I also tired to read Xavier Herbert...

I'm looking for some recognised expertise, not just an anonymous member of a forum, like us. I want something that I can cite. You seem to be making this all about you and it's actually about Kant. :wink:

I’m not looking for a rebuttal, I am looking for some expertise on Kant, perhaps a scholar on this matter. What is the expert consensus (if there is one) on this frequently touted weakness of the CI?

Why should you fallaciously appeal to the authority of a Kant expert in order to bypass or overrule my counter-argument of that critique? — Arcane Sandwich

Settle down. I will do as I want.

I think that Crocodile Dundee created the stereotype, — Arcane Sandwich

No. The stereotype was decades old. Which is why we resented its use.

It's a common critique of Kant. We should ask a Kant expert.

Lawson and Patterson are historical relics of a bygone day. Most Australians under 50 would probably not have heard of them. I have never heard a kangaroo joke in my life. Australians of my generation generally ignored their own culture and embraced overseas books, films and food. When Crocodile Dundee came out, many of my friends initially refused to see it as it was dealing in lazy cliches about the bush held mainly by American tourists. We saw Paul Hogan as pandering to that demographic to make a quick buck. Which he proceeded to do. Many bucks indeed.

but the first Australian thing that comes to my mind is Foster's beer, not AC/DC. — javi2541997

I don't think anyone here drinks Fosters. Most Australians I know drink imported beers like Asahi or Corona. Different in the country I'd imagine. ACDC? The US and Europe are their biggest markets. As I understand it, only one of the band was born in Australia, the rest are from the British Isles. :wink:

Is that right? — Arcane Sandwich

I'm not a Kant expert. But the categorical imperative - essentially - Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. This leads to the infamous scenario that if Nazis are asking you if you have Jews hiding in your attic, you must tell them where they are because lying is wrong. Hence: Do what is right, though the heavens may fall. Adhering to an absolute principle regardless of the situation seems rigid and can lead to tragic outcomes.

I think that Kant is right in the universal context—for me the mistake he makes is transferring that truth to all particular situations as a rigid notion of duty. — Janus

For what it's worth this is my read of Kant too. The old saying, often attributed to Kant - 'Do what is right, though the heavens may fall.' - hints at what the consequences of a rigid consequentialism might be. I sometimes think of this categorical imperative as a kind of blunt scientism of morality, if that makes sense.

:up: I've probably asked this before, but if your thesis is that the world is mind created, then why would maths and time and space not also be similar products of the human mind, a matrix of cognitive gestalts, if you like, rather than a reflection of some objective reality which (mostly) transcends our experience?

I'm betting on the 5th or the 12th.

↪Tom Storm? — Banno

I haven't heard anything yet.

And can you see how this notion doesn’t take away from science the usefulness that we know it has in our lives? People tend to go into a panic when you suggest his to them, as if the ground has been pulled out from under them and suddenly cats will be mating with dogs and murderers will run rampant in the streets. But accepting this idea of science as contingent artifact leaves everything exactly as it has been. It just gives us further options we didn’t see before. — Joshs

Absolutely. I accept that something doesn't have to be 'true' (or correspond to reality in some mysterious way) to be incredibly useful.

I don't think it's so black and white—either this or that. We formulate the laws of nature, but we are constrained in those formulations by what we actually observe to be so. We see regularities and invariances everywhere we look. We encounter number in our environments simply on account of the fact that there are many things. — Janus

Sure. I guess this is a common sense account. By the way, I have no commitments either way, I am just interested to hear more.

I think there is confusion around the term 'platonic realm'. There is a domain of natural numbers, right? Where is it? — Wayfarer

Yes, I'm aware of these arguments and well summarised. But what we don't often hear are the ideas @Joshs has proposed in more detail. I find them particularly interesting. I guess I used the term platonic realm as a short cut for transcendental.

why is it that mathematical predictions so often anticipate unexpected empirical discoveries? He doesn’t attempt to explain why that is so, as much as just point it out.
— Wayfarer

Apparently he has some ideas concerning why that is so.
Wigner wrote:

“It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena."He adds that the observation "the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics," properly made by Galileo three hundred years ago, "is now truer than ever before.”

I myself am a critic of ‘scientism’, the attempt to subordinate all knowledge to mathematical quantfication, but I don’t think that invalidates Wigner’s point.
— Wayfarer

If Wigner’s point is that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics, then that’s precisely what I’m trying to invalidate. It’s the human-constructed norms of nature that are written in the language of mathematics, not anything to do with nature ‘in itself’. — Joshs

I find this some of the most interesting ideas on the forum. The notion that scientific laws and maths are contingent human artifacts rather than the product of some Platonic realm seems more intuitively correct to me. But as an untheorized amateur, I would say that.

I guess Argentina would just be Spanish Texas then, or something like that. — Arcane Sandwich

Most Australians tend to see themselves as sophisticated city folk, urban hipsters, etc, emulating New York and London rather than any hic desert state. If you travel around Melbourne, most people see themselves in terms very similar to Californians. Ditto Sydney. In fact, I think there used to be an old saying that Sydney is the better half of California.

But up North we do have a Texas-like culture, everything is big and the ideas are often small (with apologies to Austin).

The other aspect of Australia is that the country is so big that most of us never travel to parts of it. I have never been to the North or West of the country. In Melbourne and Sydney you will meet many people who have been to Argentina or France but never been to Darwin or Perth.

Then it's oxymoronic because it can't be dysphoric and be good. — Hanover

This sounds like you're just playing word games. The bigger point isn't about the word 'dysphoria' but the concept of transitioning to a desired state—the idea that happiness, or even euphoria, can be achieved by changing gender and thereby feeling normal. I would take it as good that more people are able to identify a problem and be supported in the solution rather than spending their lives suppressing who they are.

There simply is no good logical explanation — Hanover

I make no comment on any so-called logic or attempts to paint transitioning as somehow deviant or unnatural. And I won't enter into yet another futile anti-trans debate masquerading as a search for truth (not that you necessarily approach it like this, but many do.) My point was a simple response to whether it is on the rise. And it may be on the rise because more people feel brave enough to express their identity, and take action - not because the commie, woke, progressives have done something nefarious to our youth... :wink:

I'd respond by saying that we shouldn't allow the Nordic person to be accepted as Asian. If you don't agree with me, why not? — Hanover

Your argument sounds like a case of false equivalence or a slippery slope style fallacy.

How is this not like the response to the 'love is love' argument for gay marriage: 'Next thing they'll want to marry a fridge or an animal'? How is this not like the response on homosexuality that permitting it is the slippery slope to bestiality or paedophilia? All familiar 'arguments'.

And who knows, maybe in the future the notion of gender and race will be be abolished and we may well be able to chose from many identities.

:up: