Even though I see despair in itself as negative I am inclined to wonder if it part of the journeying to higher states of consciousness. — Jack Cummins

Nietzsche certainly was troubled in his mental health. — Jack Cummins

materialism, via absential materialism, offers an explanation how these supposed immaterial phenomena are really higher-order, emergent properties still grounded in lower-order, dynamical processes that are physical. — ucarr

More serious, however, is the way this [i.e. exclusion of purpose, meaning, value] has divided the natural sciences from the human sciences, and both from the humanities. In the process, it has also alienated the world of scientific knowledge from the world of human experience and values. If the most fundamental features of human experience are considered somehow illusory and irrelevant to the physical goings-on of the world, then we, along with our aspirations and values, are effectively rendered unreal as well. No wonder the all-pervasive success of the sciences in the last century has been paralleled by a rebirth of fundamentalist faith and a deep distrust of the secular determination of human values.

The natural sciences are observational-experimental methods, force-multiplied by mathematical techniques — 180 Proof

Physicists are in love with the idea of objective reality. I like to say that we physicists have a mania for ontology. We want to know what the furniture of the world is, independent of us. And I think that idea really needs to be re-examined, because when you think about objective reality, what are you doing? You’re just imagining yourself looking at the world without actually being there, because it’s impossible to actually imagine a perspectiveless perspective. So all you’ve done is you’ve just substituted God’s perspective, as if you were floating over some planet, disembodied, looking down on it. And, so, what is that? This thing we’re calling objective reality is kind of a meaningless concept because the only way we encounter the world is through our perspective. Having perspectives, having experience: that’s really where we should begin. — Adam Frank

It's tempting to think that science gives us a God's-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes - rather than ignores or tries not to see - humanity's lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth.The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.

Since the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we're going, but we've gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision- scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally "see" the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.

The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

There were roughly 150 congressional members that voted against the electoral college results. — creativesoul

It would've just been easier to have an "I don't care to answer" earlier in this exchange — AmadeusD

I’m not going to debate it with you further, you can believe whatever you like, life is too short for pointless internet arguments. — Wayfarer

I am not engaging you in a political debate. — AmadeusD

Thinking of your ideas on mind created reality, I do wonder about the role of mind in leading to stated of despair. It may be that each of us creates one's own heavens and hells through nursing our own inner demons. I wonder about the role of the subconscious mind in self sabotage and in the nature of experiences in the physical world. In other words, do the dramas in life arise on account of subconscious aspects of will. — Jack Cummins

and a dictatorship, where everyone must agree with the leader.
— Wayfarer

is, in fact, the exact same thing the other side claims is the case, but in reverse? The facts of the matter are literally irrelevant. — AmadeusD

Are you sure this isn't just that half the country agree with things you don't - and that's in line with whomever they are seeing as 'leader'? — AmadeusD

It seems, when the roles are reversed, the assertion is the same... — AmadeusD

If morality is objective as a law of the universe and the main feedback or consequence we have to scientifically judge it is level of happiness, then no forum, no topic, is divorced from this topic. It is germane to all topics. I do believe that. — Chet Hawkins

The big question is how many American will just stay home. — ssu

Agreed and this is the, you guessed it, immoral cop out, of not knowing how currently. — Chet Hawkins

I do not know how to quote on this forum — Chet Hawkins

To me, it is precisely similar to saying, 'my gravity is different'. — Chet Hawkins

I would say there are cases for theft to be entirely moral. — Chet Hawkins

I hope you’ll elaborate some details of your judgment that “brain-in-a-vat Platonism” conveys an incomprehension of Platonism. — ucarr

Do you mean comprehension of Plato’s Ideal Forms requires a systemic transformation of a person’s perceptions, thoughts and beliefs? — ucarr

Why are my dogs happier than my cats? — mentos987

Biologically we are just another ape; mentally we are a whole new phylum of organism.’ Our ‘whole new’ traits—symbolic languages, cultural transmission of ideas via languages, and generation of an autobiographical self — are of central importance to our lives and our religious lives,and much remains to be understood. At this juncture, however, the concept to take in is that these human-specific traits are quintessentially emergent: they are constructe bottom-up and then deeply infuenced by environmental contexts; they make use of ancient protein families that are deployed in novel patterns and sequences.

I'm somewhat familiar with Bakker's 'blind brain theory' and his notion of metacognitive illusions. He is an eliminativist roughly along the lines of Dennett. What do you think the idea of "observer dependency' you have imputed to him consists in and explains or entails? — Janus

brain-in-a-vat Platonism at the other. — ucarr

The purpose of my writing this book is not the tapping of computer keys, nor the deposit of ink on paper, nor even the production and distribution of a great many replicas of a physical book, but to share something that isn’t embodied by any of these physical processes and objects: ideas. And curiously, it is precisely because these ideas lack these physical attributes that they can be shared with tens of thousands of readers without ever being depleted. ....

A complete theory of the world that includes us, and our experience of the world, must make sense of the way that we are shaped by and emerge from such specific absences. What is absent matters, and yet our current understanding of the physical universe suggests that it should not. A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences. ....

In this age of hard-nosed materialism, there seems to be little official doubt that life is “just chemistry” and mind is “just computation.” But the origins of life and the explanation of conscious experience remain troublingly difficult problems, despite the availability of what should be more than adequate biochemical and neuroscientific tools to expose the details. So, although scientific theories of physical causality are expected to rigorously avoid all hints of homuncular explanations, the assumption that our current theories have fully succeeded at this task is premature.... — Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

As soon as you think about something that is independent of thought, this something is no longer independent of thought! As soon as you try to imagine something that is independent of experience, you have an experience of it - not necessarily the sensory experience of it, but some sort of experience (imagination, concept, idea, etc.). The natural conclusion of this little thought experiment is that there is nothing completely independent of experience. But this creeping, all-pervasive presence of experience is the huge unnoticed fact of our lives. Nobody seems to care about it. Few people seem to realize that even the wildest speculations about what the universe was like during the first milliseconds after the Big Bang are still experiences. Most scientists rather argue that the Big Bang occurred as an event long before human beings existed in the universe. They can claim that, of course, but only from within the standpoint of their own present experience

Ironically, then, omnipresence of experience is tantamount to its absence. Experience is obvious; it is everywhere at this very moment. There is nothing apart from experience. Even when you think of past moments in which you do not remember having had any experience, this is still an experience, a present experience of thinking about them. But this background of immediate experience goes unnoticed because there is nothing with which to contrast it.This was well understood by Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most clear-headed philosopher of the twentieth century. One of my favourite quotes of Wittgenstein's is this one: "[Conscious experience] is not a something, but not a nothing either! (from Philosophical Investigations) — Michel Bitbol

We are outside the minds of other people. Do you think that we can learn about the workings of other people's minds by observation of their behavior? Doesn't your statement amount to saying psychology is impossible? — wonderer1

there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it isempirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis.

Trump on Friday appeared to confuse Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi during a speech in New Hampshire, accusing Ms. Haley of failing to provide adequate security during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and connecting her to the House committee that investigated it.

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations, has never served in Congress and was working in the private sector during the Capitol riot. ....

Mr. Trump... repeated his frequent claim that the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack — including Mr. Trump’s actions that day — “destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence.”

Then, he claimed that Ms. Haley was in charge of security that day, and that she and others had turned down his offer to send troops to the Capitol.

“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” he said. (She was not - at the time, she was a State Governor and not even in Washington.) “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”

Mr. Trump, 77, often attacks President Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Mr. Biden is mentally unfit for office. “He can’t put two sentences together,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.” — NY Times

Everything we know points to mind (as an activity) being dependent on non-mind, on material existence/ existents. — Janus

It is the fact that humanity has been mesmerized by a futile search for absolute meaning — Janus

what blog are you thinking of? — Leontiskos