Hoyle’s reputation is mixed - it was he who coined the term ‘big bang’, dismissively, in a radio interview, but I like his maverick streak, and this book always really appealed to me. — Wayfarer

:grin: Will check it out.

But we will not encourage the same intent again and warn them if they act in such a manner again, they will be dealt with next time. — Philosophim

True. The whole thing is a fluke.

I've always been drawn to 'panspermia'. I have the original book on it, by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasingha, called The Intelligent Universe, published around 1989. They argue that life on Earth originates from, and is constantly influenced by, microorganisms or genetic material arriving from space. They say the probability of life spontaneously generating on Earth is to all intents zero, with Hoyle famously arguing that the complexity of enzymes makes it impossible. Hoyle proposes that the universe itself possesses intelligence (hence the title!) which engenders life through finely-tuned physical constants (e.g., Hoyle's discovery of carbon resonance). Evolutionary Input: Earthly evolution is not solely driven by natural selection, but by the influx of viruses and bacteria from space, which can introduce new traits or even explain the rapid development of human intelligence. His colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe is still active to this day, in his native Sri Lanka. — Wayfarer

Fascinating!
This is, to me, the most plausible explanation -- that microorganisms have been around.

Nihilistic should be on the list.

In the news were pictures of the perpetrator of a $750 fraud. A 19 year-old decided to take money from customers of a fastfood restaurant without their knowledge.

Anyway, the point is, what about the multi-million dollar scammers in professional white collar fraud sitting in their big shiny buildings that are not being plastered online so we could also have fun feeling good about ourselves.

Oh wait. They do. Bernie Madoff.

The short answer is, of course, we do not know. — Questioner

This is a scientific response. "We do not know". :up:

It's okay to question abiogenesis. Other theories say the origin of life came from outerspace and was brought here on Earth. But, then the question remains, how did life start in the universe?

I had no idea how traumatized some members here are about physicalism. I searched for threads created in the past, and they were just as harsh as they are now.

So, with that said, I have decided not to engage with this topic anymore cause I feel it is insurmountable given the strong objection to this thesis.

A person attempts to rob a bank for money. While holding up the teller, they don't realize that there was a bomb about to go off outside that would have killed lots of people leaving the bank. Ultimately, the outcome of their stopped robbery was that they saved lives, but their intention was still a harm.

Intention is more about consistency under the law. While a bad intention can sometimes result in a good outcome, that is mostly accidental. — Philosophim

I disagree that the lives saved by the robbers don't count in evaluating morality. Pragmatism accepts that between two undesirable choices, the one that causes the least harm must be chosen. Even if it is only accidentally that they ended up saving lives. We must at least acknowledge that the consequence of their action has led to a better outcome. Remember that a lot of scientific discoveries that have been saving lives were accidental -- with no intention by the discoverer for a cure.

I know it doesn't look rational to think that the robbers' action should be given credit. But a gratitude should, at least, do the job.
In this case, we should set aside the primacy of intention and deal with the outcome.

I feel that you didn't need to be so vulgar and abrupt in your comment on what is after all a philosophical topic discussion. — Corvus

I wasn't. And I don't know what "abrupt" when reading posts in forums like this.

I gave the most accurate and realistic account of consciousness. But you somehow sound not only negative but also rude. I can only assume either you are hurt in your feelings for some reason or you are just obtuse and pretentious in your comment. Maybe both. — Corvus

First, I'm neither of the above. But I didn't think your post, which I criticized, should even be the question -- meaning, I expected more from you than posting nonsense like that.

@Clarendon I will try to provide some passages from philosophers related to the Vienna Circle. Herbert Feigl probably. At the moment I don't have an access to their writings.

Your comment sounds like a pretense just like what the politicians do and say. There is no logical or factual content in it. — Corvus

I'm glad you picked up on what I was trying to tell you about your comment. It's just nonsense.

First, physicalism does claim that everything that exists is ultimately physical, in the sense that all facts supervene on physical facts. Denying that physicalism is committed to this simply misunderstands the position. — Clarendon

Please provide me with some references to help me better understand. What is this "ultimately" you speak of?

Second, appealing to supervenience does no work here. Supervenience states a dependency relation; it does not explain how a wholly new kind of property could come into existence from a base that entirely lacks it. It is irrelevant, then, to the issue at hand. — Clarendon

I am not appealing to supervenience. This IS what physicalism is about. I did not invent it. The reason why you don't understand it is because you haven't read about it.

Third, nothing I have said denies that external stimuli affect the brain, or that there are correlations, mechanisms, and bidirectional interactions. Such observations are beside the point. They do nothing at all to explain how consciousness could arise from combining objects that entirely lack it. — Clarendon

Right. Keep on denying facts and place the domain of science into the hands of amateur philosophers.

So unless you think that supervenience allows you to get out what was never put in, you have not yet engaged with the argument. — Clarendon

You haven't been engaging in any meaningful argument in your own thread. What you do is keep denying facts and the proper argument to use.
You cannot ignore advances in science. You keep on using ultimate reality which has no sense when it comes to physicalism.

First, you misrepresent their view.
Then, from this misrepresentation, you created your own unsound argument.
Finally, you're going around in a circle.

I want you to provide citations since you're the one who bear the obligation to show that you are, in fact, presenting the view of physicalism in good faith.

It's not that hard.

You can study consciousness by science. But the problem is, you will not see or observe actual consciousness itself, no matter what you dissect and look into. It is not in the form of matter.

You will only observe the telltale signs, functions and behavior of consciousness from the conscious living people and animals. — Corvus

I don't know what else to make of this comment, Corvus, but to simply say if an opinion could be marked "Fail", this is it.

No one here, or in any philosophical writing I've read, is asking to observe the embodiment of consciousness. What would that look like? A square-triangular oblong?
And what does "You will only observe the telltale signs...from the conscious living people and animals" mean? Our whole constitution is conscious! It is certainly not just telltale signs.

First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist, such that consciousness has to be found a home in that picture (a project that is then problematic).

This is already problematic - for if making a particular assumption generates problems that would not have arisen otherwise, then the sensible thing to do is to give up the assumption, not double-down on it! — Clarendon

Clarendon, may I interest you in going back to your original post and provide me the opportunity to dissect it?

When you start your OP with First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist,, this is already problematic and doesn't do justice to the principles of physicalism. Physicalism is a supervenient principle -- the proponents of physicalism never claimed that the physical is what ultimately exists. I stand to be corrected if you could point me to the right direction.

A supervenient thesis doesn't claim that there's ultimate reality represented by only one entity -- that job was done by the pre-socratics. And we're not in that epoch anymore.
What physicalism claims is that there is causation, there is energy, there's science to support the entailment of consciousness. We have progressed so much in science that we can absolutely claim that the external stimulation can change our brain. Consciousness is not one way -- it is a bidirectional interaction between the external stimuli and the mechanisms in the brain.

↪Tom Storm
Maybe there is nothing to understand. If no one can lay it out, we might conclude that there is no argument―that is what I've been leading up to. You can't debunk or refute an argument that doesn't exist. — Janus

This is also an unacceptable admission. Consciousness is not some funky revelation that no one could produce a convincing argument.

First, let me say for the record that I sympathize with physicalism. No, in fact, I side with them and agree with their argument.

There is, after all, energy that drives all entities. If you actually listen to neuroplastic outside-in explanation of how, even old people's brain could create new neural connections and reinforce existing ones by doing increasingly complex tax, in which, learning gets difficult progressively.
So outside-in means there is an outside input of a challenge to perform certain tasks, and this input has been proven scientifically to have a profound effect on the wiring of our brain. And what's the common denominator between input and the physical brain? Energy. Energy is the driving force in perception.

Funny thing is, we unquestionably accept gravity as a fact -- we ourselves didn't even witness it. We were taught by people who observed that apple falls down, not up, from its tree.

If minds and meanings arise from purely blind physical processes aimed at survival rather than truth, then the fact that our thoughts reliably refer to the world and track its structure appears contingent or unexplained. Naturalism can describe how cognition functions, but it seems less able to explain why cognition should be about reality at all, rather than merely useful for navigating experience — Tom Storm

Yes: the purpose of this discussion is to focus exclusively on intentionality, without getting bogged down in the weeds of related material. If intentionality can’t be explained by a naturalistic view, then we don’t need the endless, tedious debate about consciousness which has been addressed on the forum in numerous ways already. This is about taking one small argument and trying to understand it. — Tom Storm

Okay, I get you.

The frustration with naturalism is that that their principles are not about intentionality, but causality. As you have already laid down on page 1 of this thread.

If you actually search among the mind philosophers where intentionality came from, you'd find yourself back again to the causal connection of our cognition with the structure of our brain. But intentionality, as you might have already pointed out, is not (or if you want to be argumentative, should not be) a necessity resulting from the causal relation. (We could have perception, but in the form of irrational or intractable occurences that don't give us meaning). It is its own principle and processes.

But I disagree with this view.

The autonomic bodily functions drive our intentionality also. We do not have much control over the arrival of hunger or thirst or fatigue. So, what to think about these bodily functions that make us want to eat -- and not just eat, but to choose what we want to eat?

He was also talking to those he was more positively inclined toward, such as Kierkegaard and James. — Joshs

Okay. :up:

I’d like to better understand the argument that intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes. Some naturalists will react to this idea, and I fear the discussion may end up in the somewhat tedious “how is consciousness related to a physical world?” type of threads. — Tom Storm

But your OP is about that -- how is consciousness related to the physical world, only that you stated it as if intelligibility could be extracted out of consciousness.

So, you've written a very good OP in terms of the naturalistic view, but you haven't really isolated anything from the hard problem of philosophy which is this: consciousness and the physical make up of the brain. If we could explain this, then we could explain intelligibility as it relates to the world.

Who is he talking to in the Philosophical Investigations? — Joshs


Himself — frank

I thought he was addressing the analytics. He had grown discontent towards this movement.

Stereotypes are only bad if they are inaccurate. In which case, they are not really stereotypes at all.... — Pantagruel

lol. :sweat: One of the most blatant double-talks I've read.

The reason why stereotypes are discouraged in social interaction and in formal analyses or studies is because it fixates people into a characteristic and turning this characteristic into their identity. Stereotype = identity.

People are more complex than their stereotypes.

But doesn't that just beg the question? — Arne

In what way it begs the question?

Spiritual meditation, while it does have the word spiritual in it, is the purification of mind and body, achieving the connection with the divine by letting go, momentarily, of the worldly/materialistic connections.

When we pray, we are actually acknowledging that we are human, with all our faults, trying to communicate to God for something. In fact, our prayers consist mostly of praying for success, for health, for a goal to come true, for happiness, for world peace, for safe travel. These are all worldly desires -- not saying they are bad, just that they are human desires. When we give thanks in our prayers, we are actually thanking God for the good things that come to us.

Even if they're not exactly the same, I'd say they're quite close. — Tzeentch

Jesus. Did you measure the distance in kilometers or feet?

I say, this is one of those cases where any difference seals it, and no amount of negotiation as to how far or close the definition is should change the nature of each.

Is the idea of 'philosophical counselling', a
wasteful project or something that acts
as a basis of potential?

Would you be content to rent an office and
get a signwriter to place your name next to
the title, 'philosophical counsellor'? — Alexander Hine

The ancients did have this. They were called sophós. Other names for other culture existed too.
So, in modern times, the nameplate on the door of your office should simply be "Sage".
If you were a sage, you had reached the pinnacle of virtue and wisdom and other thinkers or philosophers would pay you a visit to hear you speak.
I think you should try it. Good idea.

A friend once said, "Men are dumb and women are selfish".

That's a view the sums up her opinion of people. It's a very one-dimensional thought.
So, I responded: What are things that think with their dick? She said, "Yes."

In the news, a mother that lived with her children in squalor had one child born with a deadly SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency), though perhaps a milder form. So imagine the irony of the situation.

Without a proper facility in which to place the child, the mother decided to create the child's own bubble free of infection. All white, sanitized, bleached, dust free blankets within their tiny home -- all the rest of home could go dirty, but this child's space was kept immaculate twenty four hours a day seven days a week. The child at the time had reached the 5th birthday, and counting.

Any insights you can shed on this subject is valued. — Bret Bernhoft

I answered no. They are not the same thing. With prayers, we take our chances, with humility, to be heard. We acknowledge the power and graciousness of the God. So, whatever we pray for, asking for help or giving thanks, we are exposing our vulnerability and fears while being aware that we might not be heard after all because God has other plans for us.

I have made no secret here that I hate capitalism and think it is the cause of most of societies ills. — unimportant

Your OP reads as if we are experiencing absolute capitalism. Far from it.

There are many aspects of our society, hence aspects of our lives, that are not dictated by profit and high-risk high-reward principles. One of the greatest tragedies of the growth of capitalism is that we learned to hate governance and the leaders of our countries. Nothing the government does can be trusted. And so, we destroy ourselves because, apparently, not even medicine and science can cure idiocy.

If our society truly behaves like it's one big planet-size stock market, nothing, and I mean nothing that a fail-safe back-up plan can save us. Life would be one generation removed from extinction.

It's less 'have given up' and much more "they've been defeated'. It is extremely difficult to overcome the legal barriers erected against unionization; equally difficult is attempting to organize a company when the workers are deluged by anti-union messaging and threats. Fewer and fewer workers have experienced work in an effectively unionized company. — BC

Yes, union membership is now at its lowest. I think the inflexibility of a union is one of the reasons also. Speaking of which, look what is happening now with UPS and Amazon. UPS has laid off thousands, and will continue this year about 30k more due to the nonprofitability suffered by UPS under contract with Amazon.

The issue isn't racketeering, but a lack of motivation for proactive action. — Astorre

Yes, that is the risk. In fact, I mentioned before in another thread that there had been two experiments done on UBI in which selected individuals were provided supplemental income unconditionally to help with expenses and/or to get training for a better job/higher income. The results in both were the same, the participants did not get motivated to earn more or get a job.

First, pensions were a fine concept but those huge reserves made companies targets of corporate raiders who would buy the companies, transfer the pension money away, then send (their own company) into bankruptcy. Better to have an IRA and 401K with your name on it. — LuckyR

Good point, but I don't know how prevalent this phenomenon is.

All the rest of your comments, :up:

:lol: Perfect description!

To be more specific, the notion that democracy ignores the external influence of power, is an illusion. But did anyone actually believe this naive concept? — LuckyR

The public, consisting of the average people, is people's worst enemy.
One, the workforce (labor) seems to have given up on fighting for stronger economic condition. The pension plan had been eliminated by most corporations. What we're left with is compensation deferrals -- which is not a pension, but workers' own fruit of labor being set aside for their own subsidy in old age. Not everyone can afford to contribute to their own retirement accounts, at least meaningfully. And no one protested on the street when pension disappeared.

Two, we do not try to understand how our money held in banks and retirement accounts are being invested. The big money is beyond our comprehension -- we are passively providing the investment for corporations that, with their oligarchic behavior influencing government policies that benefit their wealth, uses money that eventually destroys us.

Three -- there is something to understand about living wages. The minimum wage is not a living wage. But increasing the minimum wage affects most small businesses and all other benefits that can be provided to the workers.

Four -- health insurance and affordable housing. I live in HCOL area, I just cannot understand how local governments can allow housing costs to go out of control without corresponding wages going out of control to match the housing costs.
And why is the social security administration still stuck in the old policy of not taxing all wages? Instead, the higher wages are not taxed after a certain amount.

Five -- taxation of the wealthy the size of the galaxy.

Just a reminder to everyone to wear a quality headphones when listening to music.
You get high fidelity sound and the sound details you wouldn't otherwise catch without one.

This isn't pure inflation due to shortages, but rather a market distortion due to a lack of incentives for production and competition. — Astorre

You missed the part of my post where I said with a combination of government services and universal basic income.
There is a way to do it without the world becoming a racketeering ghetto.

1. Humans remain needed as consumers, but not as producers. Given that the population of our planet is much higher today than in previous times, the problem is intensifying. So, how should people earn their living? Perhaps they can fill a niche in services? But even this is not infinite and will eventually be automated over time. — Astorre

It's been suggested that one solution is to provide a combination of government services and universal basic income for those that have been displaced by AI. Many workers just cannot retrain or transition fast enough to other field of work either due to age or abilities or economic reasons.
In the past displacement wasn't because there's a faster machine/AI that can do the jobs, it's because supply and demand drove the changes.
Retraining was also offered for free as a parallel transition to other jobs.
Today, it's a different fight.

3. How will a market economy cope with this challenge? After all, if we simply start handing out money to people simply for living, inflation will instantly reduce this money to nothing. Prices will simply rise. For example, if tomorrow everyone had one million dollars, then a loaf of bread would cost a million dollars. — Astorre

Would it?
Are you saying that competition for business would also disappear?
You just don't hand out money -- like during Covid. Yes, that's a good example of just handing out money. Let's use that as a lesson.

What depth of rumination can we transfer to the floor of conscious deliberation here at the Philosophy Forum? — Alexander Hine

That ethics is in the heart of governance.

I and, I'm sure, some of the members here would like see some arguments about the national security as it relates to personal data gathering and tracking of individual movements across borders and across cyber domains.

Local compute is being phased out! That's my point, not which country is making them! — BenMcLean

Fine.

True, there is a 'pressure' put on businesses to go cloud storage rather than giving businesses scale options. Most businesses are small enough to not depend on cloud for day to day operations.

This wouldn't be such a huge concern in itself if we saw a market correction to deal with it by increasing supply coming soon but instead, Micron / Crucial decided they're leaving the consumer computer hardware market altogether to focus exclusively on cloud and the clear indication across the whole industry is that they are going to intentionally reduce consumer computer hardware supply across the board, specifically to force everybody onto cloud subscriptions for everything. It seems to be happening. — BenMcLean

You got the right trajectory of events, but incorrect insight. Semiconductors have increased in production -- but maybe not in the US. Do you know whose the biggest supplier of Nvidia? Taiwan Semiconductor. Their chips production is being subsidized, not just financially, but also politically, by none other than the big C.
It got too costly to produce in the US.

Maybe you think I'm being paranoid, — BenMcLean

Well no. Just try to see where the funds come and go.

Maybe you haven't been following recent news in the computer hardware market? — BenMcLean

Do tell.

Consciousness seems like a flashlight in a dark room. We move the flashlight around and come to know what was already there. — frank

So, you are a realist!
Good analogy.

Good analysis.

What scares me is that "AI" being based on a subscription model accelerates a trend which was happening long before it -- cloud computing not just supplementing but totally replacing local compute. — BenMcLean

So servers will become obsolete?
Big companies use a hybrid of their own servers and public cloud.

What we've seen happen recently isn't just the death of Moore's Law but a clear technological regression -- the baseline requirement for the computer gaming market has actually reduced its specification for the first time in history, from 16 GB RAM back down to 8 GB RAM. This is totally unprecedented and the implication is really disturbing. — BenMcLean

I truly don't understand the sentiment here because upgrades are available.

That’s a good point. The here and now of conscious awareness is the absolute starting point for Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger and Derrida as well accept the absolute primacy of the experienced now. Their deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence aims to show that within the now itself there is a bifurcation or hinge even more intimate than pure presence. So they dont look outside of the now to what is beyond our immediate awareness, but within this assumed immediacy. — Joshs

Good!

I think of the things outside of our immediate awareness as scaffolding necessary to hold our attention to what's within our means to perceive the world.

I would hope actually that there would be a philosophical debate about war in this forum. Too easily it becomes related to current events and ongoing wars. And this is already this OP is found the lounge, not in "ethics" or in "political philosophy". — ssu

Good point!
I'm glad you're pointing this out.

I've stayed away from -- not even reading-- threads about war because the topic becomes a series of postings about current events.

There is the political philosophy proper to discuss this:
The just war theory and ethics in the battlegrounds.
The ethics of diplomacy and negotiations should also be included here.