So Biden versus Trump, again — Mikie

Early days yet. I'm sure 2023 has many surprises in store.

The argument would be "there are not multiple types of rationality, multiple, discrete logical necessities, and thus the intelligible aspect of the world must be, at some level, a unified type. The unintelligible aspects of the world, if such things can coherently exist, don't enter into the question because how can one know the unknowable?" That does seem like it could qualify as monism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you could plausibly trace the lineage of an argument of that kind from traditional philosophy (not saying I know how it would be done, but something along the lines of every discrete thing being derived from the One). The other issues you bring up - the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and Galileo's dualism - are also very interesting topics in their own right.

:pray:

Buddhism generally doesn't accept the existence of any ultimate substance (in the philosophical sense of 'substance'). But interpreting that is quite a subtle matter. Buddhism also rejects nihilism, the belief that nothing is real. The thrust of Buddhist teaching is not in positing or believing in some putative ultimate, but insight into the cause of dukkha (suffering) through the operation of the chain of dependent origination. Buddhism is very much a path of disciplined insight and discernment of this principle in operation, with the goal of the cessation of grasping or clinging, by which one is bound to repeated rebirth. That's pretty much the textbook description. But it's very easily misconstrued as a nihilistic philosophy, which is how it was always portrayed by its Brahmin antagonists, and also by the early European interpreters of it (see The Cult of Nothingness.) That comes from the understandable (but nevertheless mistaken) view of 'cessation' (nirodha) as simply meaning non-being or non-existence. Grasping the 'right view' is quite a subtle matter and the first step in the 'eightfold path'. (Some of the recent Buddhologists, such as Jay Garfield, do a much better job of interpretation. Garfield compares the suspension of judgement that is deployed by Buddhist meditation with the 'epoche' of the original sceptics, and the possible connections between Buddhism and Pyrrhonism has received a lot of attention.)

Pseudo-Dionysius is much nearer in spirit to the Platonic tradition and one of the principal sources for Christian Platonism. There's an intriguing connection in the philosophy of the early medieval monk, John Scotus Eriugena, who translated Pseudo-Dionysius into Latin (much to the astonishment of his peers). Have a read of the SEP entry on him on the 'five modes of being and non-being'. My heuristic for this, is that premodern philosophy retains a sense of levels of reality, which has generally been abandoned by modern philosophy. When you read the ancient and medieval description of the divine intellect as 'beyond being', I take that to mean 'beyond the vicissitudes of coming-to-be and passing-away' - an expression that is found in both the Western and Buddhist sacred literature. This is related to the ancient iconography cosmological philosophy of the Great Chain of Being, which has generally fallen out of favour since the scientific revolution, I think due to its association with Aristotelian and Ptolmaic cosmology. But I think it's within that general philosophical framework, incorporating the neoPlatonic principle of levels of being, that the idea of 'the One' is meaningful. I don't know if there's anything corresponding to that in today's scientific cosmology (hence why I mentioined Heinrich Pas' book on Monism above.)

Alvin Bragg files 'shoosh' order.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sought a protective order on Wednesday barring former President Donald Trump from spilling grand jury and other sensitive materials. In a 26-page motion, Bragg’s assistant district attorney Catherine McCaw noted Trump’s history of trying to undermine the various criminal investigations against him in New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C. “Defendant has posted extensively regarding these investigations on social media and has discussed these investigations in speeches, at political rallies, and during television appearances,” her motion states. “His posts have included personal attacks on those involved in the investigation, including witnesses, jurors, and those involved in conducting or overseeing the investigations. In many instances, he has even posted regarding their family members.”

Is this like the emptiness of Buddhism? — Art48

Again, the key in such discussions is to refrain from objectification or reification: there is no ultimate thing, substance, entity, or anything of the kind that can be conceptually described and grasped (something especially emphasized in Buddhism). That is the realisation that underlies the 'way of unknowing' that has analogies in all the contemplative traditions East and West. It is also why entering into it requires more than verbal analysis, it requires access to other planes of understanding that are innaccessible to philosophy and science (and not the popularised 'macmindfulness' of talk show hosts and wellness gurus, either.)

Śūnyatā, translated as 'emptiness', has often been depicted in Western culture as a 'monstrous void' or 'the complete absence of anything' but I'm sure that is also is a consequence of attempting to conceptually represent a realisation that is outside the framework of conventional discourse (one of translator Thomas Cleary's books on Chinese Buddhism is called 'Entry into the Inconceivable'.) But those kinds of insights are firewalled off from Western philosophy by being categorised along with religions, even though they are very different to the prophetic religion of the Biblical traditions. (I think they're descended more from shamanism.)

It's worth noting that the idea that everything is in fact "determined by" a "multitude of minute particles," pre-dates anything resembling science by centuries, showing up in ancient Egyptian thought and the earliest Greek thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The original impetus behind the idea of the atom was to solve the problem of the relation between the One and the Many. Atomism proposed that all matter is composed of indestructible units, eternal and unchanging. These atoms are constantly in motion, colliding and combining to form larger structures such as molecules and compounds. By positing the existence of these fundamental particles, atomism provided a way to explain the diversity and complexity of the world while maintaining its unity and coherence. This was the foundation of the legendary prose-poem of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, which was re-discovered by the French philosophes of the Enlightenment. Regardless of whether it really does describe the ultimate facts of existence, it has obviously been an extraordinarily fruitful paradigm for the advancement of science. But as is well known, the idea of the atom itself has now been absorbed into the more ethereal concepts of fields and waves, besides which there is also quite a strong tendency towards an idealist metaphysics in modern physics due to the 'observer problem'.

//I should add that the pole of the dialectic in ancient Greek thought opposite to that of the atomists, was represented in the Parmenides and the teaching that nature is One, and that only the One is an object of proper knowledge, as the world of phenomena is constantly changing and passing away and so can only ever be the object of opinion.//

all water under the bridge, apparently.

Q: Where would you look in modern English-language philosophy for discussion of the concept of 'the unconditioned'?

A: In modern English-language philosophy, you might look for discussions of the concept of 'the unconditioned' in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. Some specific philosophers and works that address this concept include:

Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason": In this work, Kant discusses the idea of the unconditioned in his critique of rationalism, arguing that human reason cannot reach knowledge of the unconditioned because it is beyond the realm of possible experience.

Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time": Heidegger explores the concept of the unconditioned through his analysis of human existence and the structures of being that underlie it. He argues that the unconditioned is the "groundless ground" of all that exists, and that it can be accessed through a process of "authentic" self-discovery.

Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief": In this work, Plantinga defends the rationality of belief in God by arguing that the concept of the unconditioned is essential to any adequate account of human knowledge and that belief in God provides a coherent explanation for the existence of the unconditioned.

David Lewis's "On the Plurality of Worlds": Lewis explores the concept of the unconditioned through his analysis of possible worlds and the idea of a "compossible" set of properties that can coexist without being dependent on each other.

Graham Harman's "Object-Oriented Ontology": Harman argues that the unconditioned can be accessed through a process of "withdrawal" in which objects reveal their hidden, inaccessible aspects. — ChatGPT

I would have nominated the first three, the second two I have heard of, but would not have thought of them.

Of course, but again, the point that I'm making is that there's an association of metaphysics with a kind of religious attitude - you see that even in neoplatonism, which at the time it was active was antagonistic to Christianity. Go back to the question- what is the unconditioned? Where in philosophical discourse do you encounter discussion of that? There's some discussion of it in German idealism but I contend that there is nothing which corresponds to it in most modern English-speaking philosophy.

Yes. And having discarded everything that used to be understood as metaphysics on account of its association with religion, then it verges on the impossible.

Predictions work perfectly well. Recall that Kant’s theory of nebular formation (slightly modified by LaPlace) is still considered current science and that Kant used to lecture on scientific subjects. Even though we may only ever know things as they appear to us, those appearances are consistent across a vast range of empirical facts. But empirical observation doesn’t amount to metaphysical insight. That’s the crucial distinction. (Beware of taking the thread into Kant, however, it’s almost as notorious a derailer of threads as interpretations of quantum mechanics.)

The sky is blue only applies during daytime therefore in this scenario truth is context dependent.

1+1 = 2 is true in all circumstances because it’s a calculation performed on numerical values.

In this aspect we get some truths being changeable and some being constant. — invicta

What I think you've sensed is about the distinction between contingent and necessary facts. In philosophy, this is explained in terms of the difference between a priori and a posteriori facts - meaning things that can be known by reason along (like arithmetic facts) as distinct from things were are dependent on circumstances (like the colour of the daytime sky).

There is an enormous history of discussion of those distinctions, but a pivotal moment was David Hume's distinction of the two kinds. The textbook examples that Hume gave are such statements as 'all bachelors are unmarried', which is true by virtue of definition, that bachelors are unmarried men. An example of an a posteriori fact was that 'all swans are white', which was certainly true in Hume's time as no Europeans had yet set foot in Western Australia, where there are black swans. Hume went on to cast doubt on the logical status of the latter kind of facts, those being dependent on experience and custom, thereby undermining the status of causal relations which until then had always been assumed to be grounded in logic. This was a fork in the road for Western philosophy.

However this was later addressed in Kant's famous 'answer to Hume'. Very briefly (and literally thousands of volumes have been written about it) according to Kant, causality is not an empirical concept at all - that is, it is not derived from experience - but a necessary condition of experience. It is one of the categories of the understanding by which we make sense of experience. In other words, we do not derive our knowledge of causality from experience; rather, we bring our concept of causality to experience, which allows us to understand and interpret experience.

I interpret @Banno as coming from the 'plain language' school of analytical philosophy, which is not about any kind of abstract knowledge of truth, but only about what can meaningfully be said. This uses the famous last words of Wittgenstein's Tractatus ('That of which we cannot speak...') as a kind of firewall against many kinds of previously-contested metaphysical questions. That kind of 'deflationary' approach is typical of much of 20th century philosophy, particularly in the English-speaking world.

But I think there's a deeper, underlying issue. I think in traditional (pre-modern) culture, there was a larger conceptual place for the 'unconditioned' or 'non-contingent' category of truths, which over the transition to modernity has gradually been eroded away. I think it's because the idea of the unconditioned is associated with the God idea which is of course anathema (pardon the irony) to secular culture. That's why I mentioned the review of Lawrence Krauss. The writer's point about the 'anxiety over contingency' draws out the issue of the limits of empiricism and the attempt to avoid the implications of that.

In fact Krauss has been criticized by a number of other reviewers for his failure to grasp the limits of empiricism, or put another way, his attempt to use empirical science to make metaphysical statements (e.g. see David Albert's review in the NY Times which provoked a notorious hissy fit from Krauss.) But the article I linked to, gives a much fuller account of the meaning of 'intelligibility', as distinct from what it calls Krauss' 'animal extroversion' (which basically means taking naturalism as a metaphysic. Notice the reference to Bernard Lonergan a Canadian Catholic philosopher who is considered a representative modern exponent of metaphysics.)

Much more could be said, but that at least points in the direction I think the OP is trying to head.

I think that is a summary view developed over a long period of time which needs to be re-analysed (which I will come back to later.)

The salient points in the article and those which are particularly salient are the anxiety over contingency and the breakdown of what Lonergan means by rational grasp of the intelligible order.

The point which I think the OP wishes to convey is the distinction between necessary and contingent truths.

All scientific work presupposes an order.

Therefore the universe is intelligible. — Banno

Other way around Banno - it’s the fact that the world is at least in part intelligible that science can get a foothold. Intelligibility is a presupposition.

I’ll come back to this thread later but meanwhile an article from my reading list which you will find relevant

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-metaphysical-muddle-of-lawrence-krauss-why-science-cant-get-/10100010

There is consensus among brain researchers that the relationship between neuron activity and mental experiences is one that goes beyond casual correlation and has all the hallmarks of a causal relationship. — Jacques

There is not. What you’re describing is a philosophical attitude, not a scientific hypothesis, known as brain-mind identify theory. There are many cogent arguments against brain-mind identity but I’m not going to bother thrashing that particular dead horse any longer.

A one party state isn't of necessity repressive. — BC

Any examples come to mind? I can only think of China, Russia (and satellites) and Iran, but they’re definitely repressive.

if I had organized the January 6 attack on Congress, I'd be in solitary confinement in a federal prison. Trump, being the president at the time, has been able to escape a similar fate, so far — BC

So far.

(Note that Plaque Flag is taking one of his regular breaks from Forum participation.)

No, the USA not a one-party state. If it were, dissidents like Chomsky would have to seek asylum away from the country. As it is, he, like anyone, is free to say whatever he likes. Yes, all political parties in America are beholden to big business, but there are real differences between the Republican Party, currently corrupted by various influences including but not only that of Donald Trump, and the Democrats. Only one of those parties favours as a potential candidate a demagogue who attempted to subvert a presidential election. Only one of them is engaged in large-scale book bans and the attempts to curtail civil and voting rights. It’s important that that party is soundly defeated at the polls rather than being able to game the system to create a real one-party state.

See also The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics

In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Päs presents a bold idea: fundamentally, everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole. The idea, called monism, has a rich three-thousand-year history: Plato believed that "all is one" before monism was rejected as irrational and suppressed as a heresy by the medieval Church. Nevertheless, monism persisted, inspiring Enlightenment science and Romantic poetry. Päs aims to show how monism could inspire physics today, how it could slice through the intellectual stagnation that has bogged down progress in modern physics and help the field achieve the grand theory of everything it has been chasing for decades.

Blending physics, philosophy, and the history of ideas, The One is an epic, mind-expanding journey through millennia of human thought and into the nature of reality itself.

A single observation of a thought without preceding brain activity is sufficient to say that mental experiences are not always caused by brain activity. However, as said, such a case has never been observed since brain scans have been available. — Jacques

However, as is well known, correlation is not causation. It is obviously the case that a functioning brain is a requirement for consciousness, but the sense in which the brain ‘produces’ or ‘creates’ consciousness is what is at issue and remains an open question. This is the subject of the David Chalmer’s paper, Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness and has been the subject under discussion in this thread for the last month.

Right. But it also applies to your contention of a causal connection between brain and mind, no less than any other causal relationship.

The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. (EHU 4.9) — Jaques, quoting David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

But you’re the one who keeps insisting on the absolute indubitability of the causal relationship between the brain and the mind. Why is this instance of an inductive causal relationship immune to Hume’s criticism which you’re so happy to apply to anything else? (Quite aside from the fact that David Hume is hardly the last word in the topic of neuroscience and consciousness.)

Wittgenstein argues that our ordinary, everyday language already contains everything we need to understand the nature of our mental lives. He believes that philosophical problems arise when we try to look for hidden, underlying structures or entities that explain our experiences. In other words, he opposes the idea that there is a hidden realm of mental phenomena that exists beyond the ordinary use of language. — GPT4~ Pierre-Normand

Would he include in that the subconscious and the unconscious? (I realise, of course, that Wittgenstein was a philosopher, and that those are terms from psychology, however both the main protagonists of such concepts - Freud and Jung - would defend the claim that the unconscious and subconscious domains are empirically real facts about the human psyche.)

In psychoanalysis, both Freudian and Jungian, whilst the patient may express herself in words, the words convey symbolic meanings which the subject may not be able or willing to contemplate, due to repressed trauma, neuroses, absence of insight, and so on. In Jung’s work in particular there was in addition the symbolic domain which often implied meaning on the level of archetypes however Freud also sought to interpret the implicit meaning of subject’s dreams. And so on. So, should we regard Wittgenstein as antagonistic to these kinds of ideas? Is this part of what he had mind?

If you continue to find a contradiction between my two statements, you are welcome to point it out. — Jacques

The self-evident conflict stands despite your attempt to deny it. First you say that

The first one only says that thoughts are always preceded by a specific brain activity — Jacques

By which you are asserting a causal relation between the brain and thought. But the very next quote undermines causal relations, quoting Hume saying they are 'only a matter of custom'. Besides, the assertion that specific brain activities can be correlated with specific thoughts is also false. The brain, as I'm sure you know, is the most complex phenomenon known to science, with more neural connections than stars in the sky. So to demonstrate a 1:1 mapping between those activities and even very simple ideas and sensations, I don't think is tenable. You're advocating what is known as 'brain-mind identity theory' which has very few advocates in today's philosophy.

Another thing you might consider when quoting Hume is Kant's 'answer to Hume'. He said, very briefly, that causality is not an empirical concept but a necessary condition of experience. It is a category of the understanding that we use to organize our sense experience. In other words, we do not derive our knowledge of causality from experience; rather, we bring our concept of causality to experience, which allows us to understand and interpret it. And for that reason, Hume's point is something which is betrayed by the use of the word 'because' in any argument - even those of that he employed.

When WA says, "Maybe that lack is one of perspective but that perspective not something that we all have," he seems to be suggesting that the ability to adopt the right perspective or framework to understand these phenomena is not something that everyone possesses. He might be implying that while philosophy serves as an antidote to the lack of wisdom, it is not always easily accessible or comprehensible to everyone. In this sense, even if nothing is hidden, not everyone may be able to see or understand what is in plain sight due to their inability to adopt the correct perspective or framework for understanding. — GPT4

That’s what I was getting at.

The bot nailed it :yikes: (I’ll come back later, busy with domestic matters.)

As I also am inclined to do. Perhaps what I meant is, even though nothing is hidden, this is also not something that everyone can understand. Philosophy is an antidote to the lack of wisdom, but that lack is the want of something. Maybe that is lack is one of perspective but that perspective not something that we all have.

Did you even read the OP ? — plaque flag

Twice. Maybe I didn’t understand it.

So as a corollary - if nothing is hidden there is nothing in need of discovery? Sits rather uneasily alongside:

Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. — CS Peirce

Thanks, very interesting!

I’ve been on a Deleuze jag lately. — Joshs

None of those continentals - Deleuze, Badiou, Derrida, Lacan - have ever been part of my curriculum, and at this stage in life it's probably too late to begin. (I have discovered, however, a couple of secular critiques of naturalism from within English-speaking analytic philosophy, I'm going to make an effort to absorb them. Oh, and I am persisting with Evan Thompson's books.)

transcendence and Idealism rear their ugly heads — Joshs

that says a lot.

It was Christianity that offered salvation for all. Philosophy never made such promisses.

. But this doesn't address whether or not there actually is transcendent meaning or value — Tom Storm

And how to arbitrate that, hmmm? Peer-reviewed double-blind lab studies? Questionnaires and surveys?

The Debt Ceiling Debate Is About More Than Debt

WASHINGTON — Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California has repeatedly said that he and his fellow House Republicans are refusing to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, and risking economic catastrophe, to force a reckoning on America’s $31 trillion national debt.

“Without exaggeration, America’s debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” he said this week.

But the bill Mr. McCarthy introduced on Wednesday would only modestly change the nation’s debt trajectory. It also carries a second big objective that has little to do with debt: undercutting President Biden’s climate and clean energy agenda and increasing American production of fossil fuels.

The debate is nothing more than shameless extortionism by a Republican Party that has been unable to acheive its goals by legitimate electoral means. They're essentially holding the American and world economy hostage against a threat of collapsing the international economic order by refusing to endorse increasing the debt limit to meet obligations that the US Government has already incurred. It is in no way a good-faith negotiating tactic, but the exploitation of a quirk in the US system of governance to bludgeon the Administration into accepting Republican political ends. Biden is right to refuse to negotiate, on the same grounds as non negotiation with terrorists or blackmailers. But let's hope the GOP backs down before causing the mother of all economic disasters to make their point.

For the most part, "the world is purposeless, a brute fact, and all things are determined by and reducible to little billiard balls bouncing around in space and this necessarily reduces ethics, aesthetics, and even logic to illusions," is still the dominant viewpoint taught in schools. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The positing of the world without value or meaning is a consequence of the Galilean division between the 'primary qualities' as being the sole criteria for what is considered to be real, and the relegation of the remainder to the subjective, 'secondary' domain. In other words, the implicit division of the subjective and objective domain, an inevitable consequence of the philosophy of liberal individualism and the ascendent individual ego. Read Bertrand Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship', one of his early philosophical polemics and still a canonical statement of that outlook. The reason Eastern or eastern-inspired philosophies have a following is because they put back into the world what the Enlightenment abstracted away from it.

thoughts and feelings are seen as caused by brain activity. — Jacques

However

causality is based neither on logical necessity nor on inductive and deductive reasoning, but on custom or habit — Jacques