nevermind

You haven't provided anything of substance. Lots of opinionated fluff and vague assertions.

Traditionalist in the sense of Guénon, Evola, Schuon etcetera?

@180 Proof interesting. A quibble: I think the advaita vendantists actually posit an eternal, unchanging self. As opposed to the Buddhists.


@Wayfarer
Thanks, I will gladly take a look at the book chapter.

That is exactly a reason to leap to no self. If thoughts are why/what we attach to a self (Descartes), and thoughts move without the direction of a central authority, then where or what is this presumed self lacking control over thoughts? Isn't it more reasonable to conclude there is only the convenient fiction of a self unifying these thoughts as they affect what also appears to be a single body? — ENOAH

But that lack of central authority could also suggest the possibility of some kind of subconscious psychical process. Which now makes me wonder if Buddhism accepts/rejects the concept of a sub(un)conscious.

Getting insight into that process unties the Gordian knot of existence. And yes, that is hard to fathom! — Wayfarer

If I understand it correctly this insight is something which can only be realised (by direct non-conceptual, unmediated experience) through a practice of meditation. The double meditation termed (post canonically) as samadhi and vipassana. Which involves essentially developing the concentration of the mind until one is able to gain insights about the nature of reality (impermanence , suffering and no-self). There are a series of steps to pass through along the way, known as jhanas, that describe the progress towards liberation.

But is this not essentially cultivation of certain states that are not natural? These jhanas are not normal everyday experiences, rather they are only possible during the practice of deep meditation. As soon as one gets back to daily life, work, stress, family... *poof* meditative states (of heightened awareness, or blissful jhanas) are gone. My question is: why would a cultivated state be considered as basis for the true nature of reality? Especially a state that most people cannot experience.

I could decide to start a practice of staring at a blank wall, plug up my ears and ignore my thoughts. I'm sure I would get pretty disoriented after a while and it would be odd to make claims about reality based on this experience.

Thanks @unenlightened @Wayfarer

Your answers are very helpful. I need to spend some more time on this.

Lag

Presented with a philosophical question, its responses too often resemble a summay of discussion points — alan1000

Exactly the result to be expected from a large language model


AI was not even created to do philosophy. It's completely irrelevant to consider whether AI can entertain thought experiments or exhibit satisfactory rational argumentation.

Sounds Bergsonian. Actual movement is indivisible but the mathematical modelling of movement is infinitely divisible.

Permalink

I don't see why you put Witty on a pedestal. It's well known that he was an awful person. How do you know he led such an "examined life"?

Also, you can't loan or borrow electronic books. — T Clark

You can actually. Many books on internet archive (one example website of many) are borrow only. Meaning that access to a particular ebook is time limited and the pdf isn't available for download (or it's encrypted).

Personally I prefer, and indeed have, a nice wall of dead trees.

Waves don't think.

And now on version 4 of chatGPT they charge the gullible punter $$ to use. A bastardisation of openAI indeed — invicta

I don't think you understand how much money it costs to host a service like chatgpt. Iirc 5 days after it opened to the public it had over a million users. The statistics now are absolutely insane. It's not feasible for openai to be an unpaid service.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-chatgpt-costs-openai-to-run-estimate-report-2023-4?r=US&IR=T

Chatbot-GPT is a useful tool that I see replacing the current state of search engines. I've been using chatgpt as a way to get more understandable c++ compile time error messages. I even pasted in complex template code from the GCC standard library (deque.tcc) and asked chatgpt to explain each part to me. It did so with ease. The potential for chatgpt as a tool to streamline learning and aid developers is huge.


It's better than current search engine implementations because it retains state. Which means that response to queries can be adjust and 'trained' to fit a particular line of question. Stupid example would be:

User: "I have such and such ingredients. Give me a recipe"
Chatgpt: "here is a list of recipes blah blah blah"
User: "but change those recipes to not include tomatoes"
Chatgpt: "sure blah blah blah"


This is a trivial example but the general concept of stateful queries is a powerful tool. I expect Google and the others will find a way to integrate ai into their engines (bing already does and Google is working on its own thing called lamda).

Oh yeah. Well that's a shame..

Banned Olivier5 for persistently attempting to derail a thread with accusations of trolling and so on, refusing to stop when I asked.. — Jamal

Which thread?

It's good to have a free-for-all section.

It doesn't even occur in certain other languages, where the concatenation of a predicate and a noun will suffice — Banno

Interesting

Truly ineffable

It's the distinction between logical truth and soundness that often feels wrong.

There is no qualifier for existential questions — Shawn

Who am I under normal circumstances?

Why should one try? What's wrong with resignation and sadness?
I hate Smile Culture! — Vera Mont

There's middle-ground.

Absolutely. It's not flawless but it gives accurate enough output to be useful. The same way Google translate is flawed yet useful to language learners.

LP is correspondence gone wrong. Astrology is coherentism gone wrong.

Yep: I'm not sure if this was intended as a counter-example, but I actually think that it is a good example: for one thing, you could come up with a worse summary of the realist/anti-realist debate RE abstract objects than the dispute between those who think that e.g. numbers exist "only in the mind" and those who do not. — busycuttingcrap

I don't follow how you can say:

X exists in the mind
∴ X doesn't exist

How is it therefore, that we make use of something that doesn't exist (numbers)?

Also, conspiracy theories do exist. That's why we can talk about them.

And colloquially, to say that something exists only as a concept in your mind is simply a different way of saying that something doesn't exist (consider: a conspiracy theory, an imaginary friend, etc) — busycuttingcrap

Numbers?

I agree that non-existent things don't exist, and that there shouldn't be a special category of existence for non-existent things. If we accept Bertrand Russell"s On Denoting, then I also agree that Santa Claus is not a referring expression, but rather a quantificational expression.

For Russell, existence is not a first-order property of individuals but instead a second-order property of concepts. — RussellA

Hey! That's what I said (Frege and Russel were in concurrence here). I tend to agree with this line of thinking.

Consideration of concepts (or their status) is perhaps relevant in the analysis of the existence predicate. Frege maintained that existence wasn't a first order predicate because that could entail absurdities like "There is an x such that x doesn't exist". Frege held rather, that existence is a second order predicate: a property of concepts, not individuals. This existence property can be instantiated or not.

A. Santa does not exist.
B. The property of being santa is not instantiated by any individual object — Heracloitus

I beg your pardon, but would you prefer to splinter off the discussion you both had into a seperate thread about the distinction of concepts from ideas and use as traditionally utilized by Wittgenstein? — Shawn

Consideration of concepts (or their status) is perhaps relevant in the analysis of the existence predicate. Frege maintained that existence wasn't a first order predicate because that could entail absurdities like "There is an x such that x doesn't exist". Frege held rather, that existence is a second order predicate: a property of concepts, not individuals. This existence property can be instantiated or not.

A. Santa does not exist.
B. The property of being santa is not instantiated by any individual object


Here is the relevant SEP entry.

You might find this irrelevant. Depends how you want to analyse "exists".

My chickens are conscious, but they don't say much. — Banno

You just don't understand the clucks.

Look at it like this, ask a scientist what existence is, and she will put the answer in the range of material substance, naturalism, the stuff atoms, quarks, and so on are made of, etc. This is a scientist's ontology. A phenomenologist will say terms like this are fine in contexts where they are common and make sense, but for philosophical ontology material substance has no meaning. I mean, what is it? for there is nothing there to fill the explanatory space. It is really just an extension of a scientist's vocabulary into a philosophical claim, but it has no empirical presence.

Phenomenology, the way I see it, simply takes what appears before us as the foundation for philosophical inquiry. In doing this, it grounds theory in what is there, simply put. Its historical precursor is Kant's "concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind." — Constance

But science is useful. Phenomenology is philosophically unproductive and useless.

I'm still learning about normal logic systems, but yep interesting stuff. Has been applied in computer science (true, false and undefined).

Another example is Lukasiewicz's 'future contingent':

I can assume without contradiction that my presence in Warsaw at a certain moment of next year, e.g., at noon on 21 December, is at the present time determined neither positively nor negatively. Hence it is possible, but not necessary, that I shall be present in Warsaw at the given time. On this assumption the proposition “I shall be in Warsaw at noon on 21 December of next year,” can at the present time be neither true nor false. For if it were true now,
my future presence in Warsaw would have to be necessary, which is contradictory to the assumption. If it were false now, on the other hand, my future presence in Warsaw would have to be impossible,
which is also contradictory to the assumption. Therefore the proposition considered is at the moment neither true nor false and must possess a third value, different from “0” or falsity and “1” or truth. This value we can designate by “1/2.” It represents “the possible,” and joins “the true” and “the false” as a third value. — Lukasiewicz

Principle of bivalence: There are only 2 truth values (true and false; a proposition is either true or false, but neither both nor neither) — Agent Smith

Tertium non datur

It's more that the expression has no referent that is the issue — Banno

Right but isn't the fact that it has no referent due to the context-sensitive nature of the proposition? 'Present king of france' seems to be a temporal indexical-phrase to me. I am aware of Kaplan but haven't yet looked into his work.

But consider "The present king of France is bald". There isn't a present king of France. Is "The present king of France is bald" true, or is it false? Or is it something else? — Banno

Are there any logical systems dealing with indexicals?

This ineffable thread surely is effing along nicely

Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake — T Clark

Yep there is nothing quite like this trilogy.

No one can say anything about the experience of red. It is ineffable — hypericin

Redness is always experienced as an attribute of a particular. Voilà, I said something about the experience of red.

Yeah time is modular on a 12-hour clock.

Lord Foul's Bane
by Stephen R. Donaldson — Pantagruel

Nice to see this show up here. I have the whole set of Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. One of my favourite antiheroes :smile: