Faith is independent of facts and of reason, and therefore no amount of facts or reason will shake anyone's faith (unless they give in to reason). — god must be atheist

This is the "realist" lie about faith. Not that I think there is a need for "intelligent design" for life to begin and proliferate. This is probably off subject, so I won't take this any further here.

hope was banned for low quality. — jamalrob

Not surprised. Too bad. I kind of liked her.

Yes, but it also makes us reassess how likely the existence of life in the universe is and calls into question the assertion that life 'must' be abundant in the universe. — EnPassant

I don't think life must be abundant, but that's where I'll put my money if I have to bet based on the very limited evidence I provided and just because.

But what if life does not arise by chance? By a statistical physical mechanism? What if life only evolves if it is brought into existence by intelligence? This alters the picture radically. — EnPassant

If I'm right, then we don't need an explanation for life based on outside influence. As has been noted many times before - the idea of life being created by aliens or extra-dimensional entities just moves the question of how life started to a different location.

Complicating the matter greatly is the fact that the evidence suggests two things:

1. These beings are nuts-and-bolts, biological, space-faring aliens.
2. They are spirits or interdimensional beings who travel here via the 'Astral Plane' as some call it. — EnPassant

I am not aware of any convincing evidence.

Physicists' language has no place in genuine philosophy. — Constance

I read this quickly while passing through, but didn't stop. Now I keep thinking about it. Do I believe this? Let's see.

First off, I get annoyed when people claim that each new discovery calls for a reevaluation of our understanding of reality. Does quantum mechanics require us to rethink metaphysics? My first reaction is to say no. I want to keep my metaphysics separate from physics. But on the other hand, I'm wonder if I'm being rigid.

I went back to your previous comment in this exchange.

But then, what is it to test? This is a philosophical question. Consider that one tests what stands before one, some thing of event. What are these at the level of basic assumptions? This is not a scientist's question, but one of science's presuppositions. Neil Degrasse Tyson has no insights to offer as a physicist, and the standard scientist's assumptions are out the window. they don't (typically) step outside their world to discuss questions like, What does it mean to call an object real at all? The ones that do end up speaking nonsense. (Keep in mind that someone like Daniel Dennett is not a naive realist. He simply doesn't read phenomenology, and in this he IS naive). — Constance

Doesn't this point to a weakness of understanding in the scientists? Shouldn't they be interested in the metaphysical underpinnings of what they study? Can you effectively study something without being aware of your presuppositions? How can you apply the scientific method unless you understand it? Doesn't that mean that physicist's language does have a place in philosophy?

Am I talking about the same things you are?

Maybe that's because I taught Lao Tzu everything he knows and everything he based his book on. — hope

So, what's LT really like? He seems pretty cool.

You will not go away. You shall engage with me and Gregory until we discover a new paradigm in physics and understanding of reality. — Outlander

Yes, master.

It's expressed incorrectly most of the time. — hope

I named this thread "My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching." It's purpose is to discuss the meaning of specific verses in relation to the whole document. I still have some thoughts of starting it up again. It's pointless for you to spout off your superficial opinion of what Lao Tzu was saying without any reference to the text itself or to the context of the whole document. It's self-indulgent.

It's just a general thread about medieval thought. If you don't like it go away — Gregory

Your opening post was intellectually misleading. I pointed it out. I will go away now, unless you keep it going.

The argument that the simulation is the reality for the brain in the vat cannot accommodate the situation where the brain is housd in a body again — hypericin

I don't understand why it would matter.

I quoted Aquinas's arguments on why he thought light was immaterial. Just as people quote and criticise Aristotle's physics.. — Gregory

Criticizing either from 1,000 or 2,000 years in the future is pointless. Both are important for historical reasons. Both come from periods before there was a distinction between science and philosophy.

"If you can't explain it to a 12 year old you still don't understand it." — hope

I think I could explain it to a 12-year-old. People here, @Noble Dust's "cantankerous autodidact philosophers" are more set in their ways. They've read philosophy, found philosophies they like, and become more rigid in their beliefs. Less open to alternative ways of seeing things.

You are criticizing 13th century science and philosophy on the basis of 21st century physics. I don't see how that accomplishes anything substantive.

I do. In this view, how would you account for what happens when the brain is unplugged, housed in a new body, and "wakes up"? — hypericin

I don't see how that is relevant to what we're discussing.

Not sure what you're getting at? — hypericin

Sad to say, I can't remember what my point was.

Tao is just the old word for consciousness.

Once you realize that consciousness is different from the mind, and that consciousness is the substrate of all evidence/experience/reality. — hope

As you can see from my comments in this thread, that's not how I see it.

the farthest edges of your mind is "mysticism" and the farthest edges of your senses is "spiritual" — hope

As the previous posts in this thread indicate, there is more to it than that.

When I said not real I meant Tao Te Ching. — Alkis Piskas

Yes. I understood that.

But then, aren't both statements 1) "the unnamed world is identified as 'non-being'" and 2) "the world does not exist until it is named" implied by Wittgenstein's statement? — Alkis Piskas

I agree. That was why I brought it up.

Then we put aside what is hard to conceive, acknowledge the argument at hand, and admit: once the room is vacated of perceptual presence, the matter turns to metaphysics. — Constance

One of T Clark's four Noble Truths is that metaphysical statements are not true or false, they are more or less useful in a particular situation. Most people don't see it that way. They think we have to choose just one way of seeing things all day, every day, forever. That means you have to throw something away to see things in a new way.

for we are in phenomenology's world now, and things are not grounded at all. In my view one has to yield to this conclusion: our finitude is really eternity. "Truth" is really eternal.
Very controversial, of course. I would only go into it if you are disposed to to do so. — Constance

I'm not sure what you mean, but I'd be happy to take it further if you'd like. It's your thread, so we can do whatever you want. I will probably be gone for several hours soon.

One cannot say anything to oneself when one has not developed the ability to think. the word "I" has to be modelled, contextualized, assimilated, and so on.
No mystery when you put it like this, in a very familiar way of referring to things. But assume, if you like, that there is such a dialog going on inside the infant's head. Toe? How does this term, this recognition "KNOW" that digital extension? It takes in the sensation of the presence which is done in TIme: first there is the sensation, THEN there is the, oh my; what is this? This association between speech and phenomenon is what is in question. — Constance

I agree. That's why I put "thinking" in quotes. I was being a little cute, but It makes sense to me that babies that age are working with their parents to create a world, with and without language I guess, that includes inside and outside.

That is the difference between brain-in-a-skull and brain-in-a-vat. BiaS can still count on its perceptual machinery being functions on reality of some sort: given the output of these functions, things about the input can be deduced. But with BiaV that link is severed completely: perception tells us nothing about reality whatsoever, where reality is the world beyond the vat. — hypericin

But...but.... Oh, wait, you resolved this conflict yourself?

(you can argue that they tell you about persistent constructs in the simulation program which is feeding your brain, and that these constructs for all intents and purposes is your reality, etc) — hypericin

Do you find that unsatisfactory? I don't.

This may seem innocuous enough, but then, consider: when you leave a room, and take all possible experience generating faculties with you, what is left behind is by no means a room, or anything else you think of. Most find such thinking impossible. — Constance

Whether or not what we've left behind is a room is another, or rather the same, metaphysical question. People may find it "impossible" because it's hard to see beyond language. As long as "room" is hanging around, it's hard to conceive that the room itself may not be.

What does this mean if not agreement, and what gives itself to agreement better than the immediacy of what is directly apprehended. — Constance

Let us now say the sun is best defined as a phenomenological aggregate of predicatively formed affairs (Husserl) which are witnessed, at the very basic level, as phenomena, — Constance

Witnessing and apprehending are not immediate or at the very basic level. They are up the ladder of mental processing from the place where objective reality is encountered. Unless there is something more basic, which makes sense to me.

how opaque or transparent is the brain as a receiver of the object as it is, unmodified, undistorted; how epistemically transparent of opaque is this brain? — Constance

Not at all transparent, but how is that different from a brain in a skull-vat rather than a glass-vat?

he big mystery is this: outside?? Talk about an outside implies one has the means to affirm what is not inside. — Constance

The idea of outside vs. inside always makes me think of this:



I imagine a baby "thinking" to itself as it holds it toes - "Hey, when I hold these things, I can feel something. Hey...wait a minute - I think they are part of me." So, anyway, I guess that means we learn inside from outside the same way we learn everything else. Why is that a mystery? It seems plausible to me.

And I think it would be safe to surmise that the same is true of most people. — Apollodorus

Most people have not been shown, or told, about quantum mechanics, number theory, or diesel engine repair either. That doesn't mean they are mysterious.

Thanks you for your response. This is certainly quite an interesting. But maybe from a point of view that is not so real for most of us (in the West). — Alkis Piskas

Less familiar? Sure. Less real? No. I just wanted to point out that the idea of language limiting our worlds is not uncommon.

well-known, clear-cut, and non-mysterious — Apollodorus

Just because something is not well known does not mean it is mysterious.

Additionally, when people do have knowledge, it is not direct, personal knowledge, it is second-hand knowledge acquired from scientists. Scientists themselves have no direct knowledge of scientific facts but learn about them from other scientists, etc. Plus, they may have no knowledge of things that are outside their particular discipline or field, and so on. — Apollodorus

Most of what we know about everything we know because we've been told or shown by others.

We don't even know who it is that knows or thinks that they know. — Apollodorus

There is an established discipline of cognitive psychology and science which works on issues of perception, emotion, consciousness, and other aspects of mind from a scientific viewpoint. The phenomena they study and theories they develop are not mysterious or outside the limits of mainstream science.

OK, but it doesn't mean that it is not part of the "world" of the one who experiences it! — Alkis Piskas

I don't know Wittgenstein, but that's never kept me from throwing in my <$0.02 worth. There is a sense in which the world does not exist until it is named. This is examined in the Tao Te Ching. The unnamed world is identified as "non-being," while the named world is called "being." I think this is a useful way of seeing things, but it certainly isn't the only way. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with what Wittgenstein was talking about.

I can't judge the accuracy of your translation, but it is very graceful. As for your poll question - In my view, values are human, not universal. Is that what you mean by "derivative of order(s)?"

On the simple level of a physical reduction, we most certainly already are a brain in a vat; I mean actually, for the vat in question is a human skull and there we are "wired up" to receive the world. — Constance

It seems to me that a big difference, maybe the most important one, is that we are not just wired up to the "world." We are also wired up to ourselves. Interoception, our sense of our body, is an integral part of our awareness and consciousness.

Such a concept is meant to challenge our basic thinking about knowing the world, for brains in vats are, to the events actually surrounding the brain, epistemically opaque. Nothing can be know about that room where the brain sits envatted given that knowledge is simply given through wires and programming. — Constance

Not sure what "epistemically opaque" means. How is that different from our brains?

No matter how you slice it up theoretically, you will never explain the essential epistemic connection to make "out there" come "in here". — Constance

This doesn't seem right to me. What's the big mystery about getting stuff from out there in here? We are wired to the outside. Signals come down the wires. Our nervous and other systems process the signals. That processing is called "the mind." We send signals back.

How does one ever affirm a "true objective reality" is has not encountered such a thing to even talk about? this becomes an entirely metaphysical affair, — Constance

I agree with this. The idea of objective reality can be really useful, but it's not true. Or false for that matter. That's how metaphysics works.

When it comes to things like consciousness, how it operates, and how it produces cognition, perception, experience, etc. it is all guess work. — Apollodorus

This is not correct. It's not guess work at all. There's just a lot we don't know yet. Not the same thing. Because, you know, science.

However, people tend to use it to disparage any religious belief they disagree with, — Sam26

Using language incorrectly out of laziness or ignorance or for emphasis, makes our language less powerful and less clear. There are plenty of good ways to express your disdain for religion without messing things up. It makes you look lazy and ignorant.

You've raised a lot of good points. Let's start out with an overview. The way of thinking I'm describing in my posts on this thread is not the only way of seeing things. It's a way that I find effective in helping me understand the way the world works. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying I've found this helpful and maybe you should try it out to see if you like it. And you don't even have to choose. You can think of it either way or both ways. Or maybe my way of seeing things doesn't work for you.

Isnt the painting itself an interpretation, and always a slightly different one every time we return to it, the same way that a novel or a poem means exactly how one interprets it at any given time — Joshs

Regarding your quote , of course when we hear the first notes of a song we notice the physical instruments -and other such surface details. — Joshs

Interpretation means "the action of explaining the meaning of something." As I've said, I don't think music and art mean anything. No, I don't think visual art tells a story. As the quote I provided says "the music meant nothing at all but what it was." That means all the music, not just the first few notes.

Now about poems and novels - I'm going to punt on that. There is a sense where they don't mean anything in the same sense that art and music don't, but I'm not interested in defending that position right now.

Music is a language that particularly well suited to convey these shifts in feeling from moment to moment. That does not mean that it is content free. — Joshs

I haven't thought about this before - do only things that mean something count as content? Is music content free? I'll have to think about that.

As long as we are conscious we are construing our world moment to moment on the basis of how the next event is similar and different with respect to the previous. This is the basis of all language. As we perform this construing moment to moment , we perceive each event both in terms of it’s unique content and its affective relation to what went before it , how it either carries forward or changes a previous mood , a feeling disposition, a motivational attitude , the way in which events matter to us. — Joshs

I'm going beyond my level of expertise, but I think you're right - we are constructing and reconstructing our world on a continuing basis. I don't see that as primarily a linguistic process.

Can you now see the protective effects on our vulnerable population by unmasking our healthy vaccinated population? — Roger Gregoire

The mechanism you describe seems very, very unlikely to me. I certainly won't accept it without evidence.

The evidence for masks is lacking, but not so for the vaccines. — Hanover

I agree. I'm not really interested in the effectiveness of wearing masks. I wear them when I'm told and don't when I'm not like all good subjects of our corporate overlords. My typical response to someone who objects to wearing masks when it is recommended by public health authorities is very logical - Just shut up and put on the mask, asshole.

@Roger Gregoire went a step further in his argument then typical mask deniers. He claims that, if vaccinated people don't wear masks, it will actually remove a significant portion of the virus from the air, thus helping protect the unprotected. That was the argument I was responding to.

Be rational. Don't adhere to the irrational game of "let the rare exceptions dictate the general rule". This only results in more harm than good. — Roger Gregoire

That this kind of bullshit is one of the reasons why serious debate is next to impossible. Laymen weighing in with a superficial understanding of the science and no references or citations to back up their outlandish claims. — Isaac

Not once in your emotional rant did you refute my logic. -- can you? -- can you find a logical flaw in my words (other than just saying they are wrong)? — Roger Gregoire

I'm with Isaac on this one. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that a significant proportion of the viral load in the atmosphere would be removed by the lungs of people not wearing masks. I looked, but couldn't find evidence either way on the web. My conclusion - the scenario described in Roger Gregoire's post is unsupported unless he can provide evidence. This isn't a matter of "logic." It's a matter of fact. As far as I can see, RG has his facts wrong.

Oh, Ok. Then I'll address my remarks to Joshs; "convey" implies that something moved from here to there, so one might be tempted to ask what it is that was moved, and set that out in words. But nothing - no thing - was moved. — Banno

Convey (from web) - Make (an idea, impression, or feeling) known or understandable to someone.

Second definition.

Display might be a better choice. — Banno

I was using Joshs' language. I think "convey" and "display" are both fine.

I'll agree with this, but add that it is by way of a definition of meaning. Music and visual arts can can of course still be profound. There is a strong sense in which setting out the meaning of a piece is detracting from it. — Banno

Yes, I guess it comes down to what we think "means" means. In everyday language, "meaning" is often used to mean significance. That's not what we're talking about. So, yes, the best music and art is profound, even if it doesn't mean anything.

But don’t the components of a painting tell a story? — Joshs

I've used this long quote about four times in the past month. Now I have to do it again. This is a quote from "October Light," by John Gardner. A French horn player describing what he hears when he listens to a composition. I've hidden the text to keep the post short.



Emphasis mine. Art is the same as music. It means nothing at all but what it is.

I could describe in words da Vinci’s last supper, or show the painting. Could the words used to describe the scene ever convey more than the visual image? — Joshs

No. The painting will always convey more. More importantly, what the painting conveys is different from what any interpretation provides.