So causality is the narrative we tell, the map of how to get to where we want. But then philosophy came along and started injecting a little more metaphysical rigour into this exercise. What was causality as a narrative at the level of the Cosmos itself? — apokrisis

Again--but sometimes the concept of causality is just not a useful one.

Is everything causally connected to everything else? If I throw a ball from the fifth floor, I know that the cause of the ball falling is because I threw it. And I don't have to look for the cause in, say, the movements of the stars. So it seems that not everything is causally connected to everything else. There are limits to causal influence. — JuanZu

how far should we extend our view in casual relationships? If it is true that the movement of the stars does not explain why the ball fell to the ground from the fifth floor, it follows that there is a kind of causal disconnection. In that sense, one might say: there is continuity and there is causal discontinuity. — JuanZu

I think you're talking about the same thing I was when I discussed the idea of cause only being useful when we can separate the events in question from their surrounding environment. If I wanted, I could find a causal connection between the stars and the ball, but it is not relevant to the question at hand.

For philosophers "causality" is a metaphysical notion, whereas for physicists it's a practical principle, to aid in understanding how & why things happen. — Gnomon

Causality is practical, useful, to scientists sometimes. Sometimes not. Physicists more often than biologists.

Ironically, that swampy quicksand logic allows people of Faith to claim that their metaphysical "reasons" & divine revelations are just as valid as a scientist's physical-empirical Facts & Faxioms. — Gnomon

I don't see how the kinds of issues I'm talking about have anything to do with religion.

So, where does that leave us public reasoners on a non-empirical (metaphysical) philosophical forum? Are the conjunctions in our reasoning so weak that none of our arguments will hang-together under the universal solvent of skepticism? Are our fundamental (self-evident) axioms only valid within a single isolated-but-united Faith community (-isms)? — Gnomon

I'm confused. Denying that of the idea of cause is always a useful one has nothing to do with skepticism.

Causality as efficient cause is not wrong. It just is always shaped by some prevailing context. — apokrisis

It seems to me that the cause people are talking about when they talk about everything having a cause is efficient cause. Do you disagree? Maybe I should have called this thread "Against Efficient Cause."

When you say "context" I think you are saying something similar to what I meant when I wrote "What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments..."

Constraint removes possible futures, but normally still leaves many possibilities open. Accidents can happen. Asteroids could be on paths that just miss the Earth as there was no constraint on that fact. — apokrisis

Sure, when we're talking about asteroids or artillery rounds, but what about when we're talking about complex systems like the salt marsh I discussed.

So causal accounts are flexible like this. We learn to make good choices about how much events are to be explained by contextual circumstances and how much by accidents or free choices. — apokrisis

I have no problem with this, but I think sometimes, often, it doesn't make sense to consider causality at all.

I just wrote what I consider a most beautiful work of art. It argued that the condominium covenants did not bind the association to protect against water heater leaks from individual units, but that obligation rested entirely with the individual unit owners. It was a work so maginficent, it made the Sistine Chapel look like a steaming pile of cat shit. — Hanover

But seriously, don’t you ever read a legal argument or decision that you think is beautiful, wonderful? I do.

I find beauty in the diversity of personalities, including those so boring they find beauty in blueprints. — Hanover

For what it’s worth, I’ve also found beauty in well thought out and well written legal decisions.

https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf

That is, there can be more beauty in an analytical essay than a limerick. — Hanover

I have made the argument that there is beauty in a set of construction specifications.

Language itself or how language is used? — Tom Storm

I must admit it was just a passing fancy and I haven’t put much thought in it. I guess that means I don’t know.

Do you have a favourite aesthetic experience out of poetry, painting, architecture or nature? — Tom Storm

Hard to pick just one. For poetry I’ll say “The Black Cottage” by Robert Frost. For architecture — Machu Picchu.

You're right. This is probably the sorriest thread I ever started here. — RogueAI

Congratulations.

Scientists are now seriously asking if humans were seeded by aliens — RogueAI

The article doesn’t say anything about humans being seeded by aliens. It says that some of the components for life might have been transported to earth on meteorites or comets.

For discussion: How do you think the media should cover these events? — BitconnectCarlos

This is simple. Murders are generally discussed as local news, which is appropriate. When you expand the discussion beyond that, you’ve already made a judgment that brings debates about social issues into the discussion, often inappropriately or unnecessarily - as you note, to make political points.

The whole process is flawed and biased.

I don't understand why you removed substance from my definition, but something that objectively exists is a substance, as opposed to something that subjectively exists, such as an experience. — MoK

The definition of “substance” I was using refers to a physical material. The word has several other meanings, but they don’t seem applicable to this case.

the brain cannot produce the mind and be affected by the mind at the same time. — MoK

Yes, it can.

Biology, chemistry, etc., are reducible to physics. That means that we are dealing with weak emergence in these cases. — MoK

This is not correct.

To me, abstraction and imagination are examples of thinking. Remembering, free association, etc. are not. — MoK

As I’ve noted several times in this thread, you are using non-standard definitions for words. Your and my arguments are incommensurable, by which I mean, our underlying arguments are not resolvable.

Let’s leave it at that.

↪T Clark That's an interesting Pinker quote, although I myself frequently think in English sentences - not that I regard that as typical or as something everyone would do. Others have said here there are people who can read and speak perfectly well without ever being aware of a stream of thought in their minds. I think my 'bottom line' with respect to AI (with which I now interact every day) is that LLMs are not subjects of experience or thought. And if ask any of them - Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT - they will affirm this. They are uncannily like real humans, right down to humour and double entrendes, but they're reflecting back at us the distillation of billions of hours of human thought and speech. — Wayfarer

After this whole discussion started, I went doing a little research on Google and in the SEP. What I found is consistent with what you’re writing. There seem to have been two approaches to this question - one that uses a language-based approach and another that uses the kind of processes that are described in an LLM. I guess it is controversial which one is the proper one to use in this kind of a situation.

self awareness and introspection is at the core of all understanding of personal need. — Jack Cummins

There’s a great deal of skepticism, even hostility, here on the forum to the idea that introspection, self-awareness, and intuition are fundamental to philosophy.

My point is that your quote is of a position that is generally challenged and not widely held. — Hanover

I’m aware that it’s controversial, but that wasn’t my main point. I was just trying to show that it is unreasonable to assume that language is necessarily required for thought.

They stress that language is not primarily a system of communication, but a system of thought. Communication is a secondary use of an internal capacity for structuring and manipulating concepts. Animal communication systems (e.g., vervet alarm calls) are qualitatively different, not primitive stages of language. — Wayfarer

This is what Stephen Pinker had to say in “The Language Instinct.” I’m not sure if this contradicts what you’ve written or not.

Any particular thought in our head embraces a vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a thought to someone else, attention spans are short and mouths are slow. To get information into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But inside a single head, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because the internal representations are the imagination. We end up with the following picture. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought.

I was going to bring up A Man Without Words. Someone here brought him to my attention several months ago. Ildefonso was born totally deaf. Nobody ever tried to communicate with him until he was 27. He literally had no language. — Patterner

This is what Stephen Pinker had to say in “The Language Instinct.”

In her recent book A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the sign for “cat.” A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the sign for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities.

An explanation is needed that can account for the phenomena we call mental or conscious. — JuanZu

The fact I might not be able to account for the phenomena right now doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation.

What is the neurological configuration from which we can deduce the glass of water as a conscious experience? — JuanZu

That is the essence of emergence. An emergent phenomena can be shown to be completely consistent with the principles of a lower level of organization. For example, all living phenomena must be consistent with the principles of physics and chemistry. That doesn’t mean that the emergent phenomenon can be predicted, constructed, or deduced from the principles of the lower level of organization. Again - the principles of biology cannot generally be deduced from the principles of chemistry or physics. In the same manner, mental phenomena cannot be predicted based on neurological or biological principles.

we could be beings without consciousness and without experience, and yet the neurological explanation would still persist and remain valid — JuanZu

That seems obviously false to me. Can you provide some evidence?

the mind is … something that objectively exists and has a set of abilities and properties, — MoK

I’m OK with that as edited.

it cannot be an emergent thing. — MoK

Of course it can. Life emerges out of chemistry. Chemistry emerges out of physics. Mind emerges out of neurology. Looks like you’re understanding of emergence is different from mine.

That is a very broad definition, which I don't agree with. — MoK

But that’s what it means. As I’ve said before, if you want to make up definitions for words, it’s not really philosophy. You’re just playing a little game with yourself.

But isn't your intuition that your mind is also a thing that you can ascribe qualities to? — RogueAI

No. I'm trying to think of it that way now, but not having any luck. — Patterner

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that something that seems completely obvious to one person is not even imaginable for another.

My view of art is that it is a form of language, and the expression through painting is just another way of speaking, writing, or grunting. — Hanover

I’m not being particularly facetious when I say maybe it is language that is a form of art.

It is interesting that you and I perceived the same -- The girl felt self-conscious about something. I guess the expression of her eyes and the innocent position of her hands caught our attention. — javi2541997

Collingwood says the purpose of art is to express the artist’s experience. Our goal in looking at art is to try to share that same experience with them.

I have big issues in thinking about the nature of inner and outer reality..The inner perspective is a way of focusing on the outer, but it is not absolute, because it may hold limitations of others's perspectives. It may end up with a form of philosophy shoegazing. Being able to look within and outwards simultaneously, in thinking of needs, self and others may be an intricate process in thinking about the experience of needs. — Jack Cummins

This will probably just confuse things, but I have come to think that all philosophy is inward looking, introspection. Everything we do here is looking at ourselves, self awareness. When we think we are looking out into the world, we are really only looking at ourselves, looking out at the world.

This probably is not the right place to take this any further. I don’t want to distract from your thread.

Girl with Peaches by Valentin Serov. — javi2541997

I was thinking about it some more. Maybe the girl was playing by herself, engrossed, and then someone, maybe one of her parents, came in and she became self-conscious.

Thanks for keeping this thread alive.

I can see that the dichotomy between inwards and outwards exist to some extent. However, the panorama of this may be a little more complex, — Jack Cummins

Sure, I was generalizing to get my point across. But I still think that generalization tells something significant about the differences between the two styles of philosophy.

The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea*. The conscious mind** can experience and create an idea. An AI is a mindless thing, so it does not have access to ideas. — MoK

There are plenty of other mental events that come to mind that might be considered emergent. As we’ve discussed previously, as I see it, the mind itself is emergent from the neurological and physiological processes of the nervous system and body.

Beyond that, this is a circular argument - your evidence that AI can’t think is that it is mindless, which means “having or showing no ability to think, feel, or respond.”

… thinking is defined as a process in which we work on known ideas with the aim of creating a new idea — MoK

No. Thinking is:

cognitive behavior in which ideas, images, mental representations, or other hypothetical elements of thought are experienced or manipulated. In this sense, thinking includes imagining, remembering, problem solving, daydreaming, free association, concept formation, and many other processes.

You’re using non-standard definitions again.

. It probably represents a far 'softer' form of thinking than in Western philosophy. — Jack Cummins

The way I think about it is that eastern philosophy looks inward and western philosophy looks outward.

Here are some thoughts from the Tao Te Ching - Stefan Stenudd’s translation.

Verse 44

Your name or your body,
What is dearer?
Your body or your wealth,
What is worthier?
Gain or loss,
What is worse?

Greed is costly.
Assembled fortunes are lost.
Those who are content suffer no disgrace.
Those who know when to halt are unharmed.
They last long.

Verse 46
When the Way governs the world,
The proud stallions drag dung carriages.
When the Way is lost to the world,
War horses are bred outside the city.

There is no greater crime than desire.
There is no greater disaster than discontent.
There is no greater misfortune than greed.

Therefore:
To have enough of enough is always enough.

My take on this - Desire for accomplishment, acclaim, status, wealth distracts us, makes it harder to be aware of, our Te, our intrinsic virtuosities, the voice inside us.

Chuang Tzu wrote - “ What I call sharp hearing is not hearkening to others, but rather hearkening to oneself, nothing more.”

The ‘original anthropology’ the OP refers to was associated with spiritual movements. For that matter, the original ‘therapeutae’, from whence comes the word ‘therapy’, was a severely ascetic religious sect concentrated around Egypt and Judea. They were highly ascetic: they renounced wealth, lived celibately, ate only the simplest foods, devoted themselves to study of the Torah and allegorical interpretation, and practiced prayer and meditation. — Wayfarer

Maybe my statement was too strong, but I still think philosophies and spiritual practices that don’t focus on those issues and be of value.

jerking off about their spiritual journeys. — Tom Storm

What would the forum be about if it weren’t for our jerking off about our spiritual journeys?

There may be many people who live very good, yet largely unexamined, lives. — Janus

There are, and any philosophy that doesn’t acknowledge that is fundamentally flawed as I see it.

There is a Taoist monastic tradition; the lifestyle is similar to Buddhist monks in broad outline, obviously with a different set of traditions. They embrace celibacy, etc. Hermetic life is also part of the tradition, obviously with Lao Tzu himself.

The role of the daoshi priests would be "esoteric practice" though, no? — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true, and my experience and understanding of those traditions is not very deep. But if you go back to the source - the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu - you find very little of that.

That might be because this topic is philosophy of religion. — Wayfarer

There is very little about religion in the OP. The sources identified in the first paragraph of the OP are social commentary. Philosophies that don’t focus on truth, virtue, or purpose are not somehow a sign of decadence.

I think there is a puritanical elitist element in the idea that modern self-help programs are merely watered down caricatures of the ancient "true" practices. I mean, if these programs really do help people to live better, more fulfilled and useful lives, then what is the problem? Is it because they don't really renounce this life in favour of gaining Karmic benefit or entrance to heaven? Is the most important thing we can do in this life to deny its value in favour of an afterlife, an afterlife which can never be known to be more than a conjecture at best, and a fantasy at worst? There seems to be a certain snobbishness, a certain classism, at play in these kinds of attitudes. — Janus

This makes sense to me. I don’t know much about Buddhism. The only Asian philosophy I have experience with is Taoism. That has always struck me as a reasonably practical and down home philosophy. As I understand it, there isn’t much talk about inevitable suffering, self renunciation, or esoteric practice. God has always struck me as an afterthought. I never felt any conflict between how I knew the world as an engineer versus how I knew it as a reader of Lao Tzu.

My attitude towards all philosophies, eastern or western is that their primary purpose is to encourage self-awareness. That’s certainly true of Taoism.

What is the mind to you? The mind, to me, is a substance with the ability to experience and cause. The mind cannot be certainly an emergent thing, given my definition of it. — MoK

Here’s the definition of mind from Wikipedia. It’s similar to other ones I found on the web.

The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances, and unconscious processes, which can influence an individual without intention or awareness.

It seems as though you want to use a non-standard meaning for the word. That’s your prerogative I guess, but it makes it hard to have a discussion with you.

This is a disturbing thread.

As a moderator, you should know that embedding videos is against forum guidelines. You guys made a big deal about it a month or so ago. Or did I miss some change in the policy?

The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea that is created by the conscious mind. — MoK

This certainly isn’t my area of expertise, but it has always struck me it is the mind itself which emerges from the human neurological system.