I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. The World is God — plaque flag

The problem for me is that reason by itself tells us nothing, it is really just a good practice of consistent thinking — Janus

a critical mind will ask the question as to how we know this most attractive thought is actually true.

And I can't see any possible answer other than that it might "feel right". It isn't empirically verifiable, and it isn't logically necessary, so what other ground do we have? — Janus

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears to be finding multiple galaxies that grew too massive too soon after the Big Bang, if the standard model of cosmology is to be believed.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin find that six of the earliest and most massive galaxy candidates observed by JWST stand to contradict the prevailing thinking in cosmology. That’s because other researchers estimate that each galaxy is seen from between 500 million and 700 million years after the Big Bang, yet measures more than 10 billion times as massive as our sun. One of the galaxies even appears to be more massive than the Milky Way, despite the fact that our own galaxy had billions of more years to form and grow.

“If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, associate professor of astronomy who led the study. “We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.”

For galaxies to form so fast at such a size, they also would need to be converting nearly 100% of their available gas into stars.

“We typically see a maximum of 10% of gas converted into stars,” Boylan-Kolchin said. “So while 100% conversion of gas into stars is technically right at the edge of what is theoretically possible, it’s really the case that this would require something to be very different from what we expect.” — UT News, Austin, Texas, 13 Apr

Any personal experiences? — Tom Storm

If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.

But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things [in other words, our being is contingent]. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself [unconditional being]. This is why it’s important for God to be infinite: because this makes God more himself (herself, itself) and more fully real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.

Hegel’s second main point is that this something that’s more fully real than we are isn’t just a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being more fully real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We have this experience when we step back from our current desires and projects and ask ourselves, what would make the most sense, what would be best overall, in these circumstances? When we ask a question like this, we make ourselves less dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire or to have the project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through our thinking about what would be best. But something that can conceive of being self-determining in this way, seems already to be more ‘itself’, more real as itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.

Putting these two points together, Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception of God that he criticized. If there is a higher degree of reality that goes with being self-determining (and thus real as oneself), and if we ourselves do in fact achieve greater self-determination at some times than we achieve at other times, then it seems that we’re familiar in our own experience with some of the higher degree of reality that we associate with God. Perhaps we aren’t often aware of the highest degree of this reality, or the sum of all of this reality, which would be God himself (herself, etc.). But we are aware of some of it – as the way in which we ourselves seem to be more fully present, more fully real, when instead of just letting ourselves be driven by whatever desires we currently feel, we ask ourselves what would be best overall. We’re more fully real, in such a case, because we ourselves are playing a more active role, through thought, than we play when we simply let ourselves be driven by our current desires.

Why is there no point in discussing a "a perennial philosophical reflection" on a philosophy forum? — Art48

So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" — 180 Proof

How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof

You seem to begin with an assumption there is a supernatural or divine. — Tom Storm

for the most part, traditional dialectics, by their very nature, start with the assumption that one side is right and one side is wrong. — ClayG

But qualia are slippery eels. — plaque flag

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig distinguishes between two modes of understanding the world: the classic and the romantic. The classic mode of understanding is based on the rational and analytical approach of traditional philosophy, while the romantic mode is based on intuition and direct experience. According to Pirsig, these two modes of understanding are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, and he believes that they can be integrated through a metaphysics of quality.

Pirsig sees quality as a kind of objective reality that is independent of subjective perceptions or preferences, and that is inherent in all things. He believes that the pursuit of quality is what gives meaning and purpose to human existence, and that it is the key to a fulfilling and satisfying life. The metaphysics of quality that Pirsig proposes is an attempt to reconcile the classical and romantic modes of understanding by recognizing the importance of both reason and intuition in the pursuit of quality. — ChatGPT

The nexus between an object being bombarded by effects of the universe and and an object being bombarded by effects that matters is consciousness. — schopenhauer1

If humanity does make contact with a higher intelligence, through the use of AI-powered communication tools, what sort of philosophical implications does that have for humanity? — Bret Bernhoft

Q: Are systems like ChatGPT sentient life-forms?

A: No, systems like ChatGPT are not sentient life-forms. While they are designed to mimic human language and respond to input in a conversational manner, they do not possess consciousness or self-awareness. ChatGPT is a machine learning model that uses algorithms to analyze and process language data, and its responses are generated based on patterns and probabilities learned from the input it has been trained on. It does not have subjective experiences, emotions, or the ability to make decisions based on its own desires or goals. — ChatGPT

Brains model worlds. In order to construct an “objective” view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully “other” itself as the “subjective” part of that viewing. — apokrisis

The contents of human minds are Ideal (in the sense of subjective concepts), and everything else is more or less Real. From that perspective Universals are merely memes in human minds. Whether they exist elsewhere is debatable. But we like to think that mathematical Principles and physical Laws are somehow Real, since evidence for them is found consistently in Nature. :smile: — Gnomon

The world, through us, comes to make its own nature or character more and more explicit. It comes to know itself. We are god's spies, god's eyes, god's authors. — plaque flag

OK, but I don't believe the idea is that consciousness is like a mirror which reflects physical, emotional, and mental sensations but is unaffected by them is inextricably connected to anything. The idea happens to occur in Vedanta but it's an idea that anyone, East or West, might believe or, at least, find interesting. — Art48

If so, I don’t care. — Art48

...Wittgenstein... — plaque flag

As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).

That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. — Ed Feser

We drop 'mindindepent' as confusing. We grasp language in terms of embodied enacted social norms which are out there in the world as patterns in our doings. — plaque flag

The fear of slipping into “vitalism” — the idea that living things are alive because of some non-physical vital force — arises only because we have so much difficulty reckoning with the presence of ideas in the world rather than merely in our heads. I mean potent, shaping ideas. After all, the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual. Yet we can reasonably say that such relations — for example, those given by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, representing Newton’s law of universal gravitation — in some sense govern material reality. The relations tell us, within the range of their practical applicability, something about the form of physical interactions. We do not try to make an additional, vital force out of the fact that a mathematical idea, as a principle of form, is “binding” upon an actual force. — Steve Talbott, Evolution and the Purposes of Life

Ultimate ground of existence is a purely secular/philosophical idea as is the idea it can be directly experienced as uncreated light. — Art48

The general populace often isn't terribly interested in the truth, much less a direct encounter with it. Many scientists, however, are deeply interested in the truth. — Art48

One reason I like the above line of thought is that I find it so much more satisfying, intellectually and philosophically, than, to be blank, religion’s fairy tales. And I think it may even be a true and accurate picture of reality. — Art48

Why not there like a dance is there ? — plaque flag

It's not that the difficulty of locating consciousness among the neuro-signaling forces us to look for it in something else--that is, in some other sort of special substrate or ineffable ether or extra-physical realm. The anti-materialist claim is compatible with another, quite materially grounded approach. Like meanings and purposes, consciousness may not be something 'there' in any typical sense of being materially or energetically embodied, and yet may still be materially causally relevant. — Terence Deacon, Incomplete Nature

Since the content of Nagel's article is off-topic, I won't discuss it further in this post. Except to say that it may indirectly suggest why some of us, frustrated by the inadequacies of Reductionism, Materialism, and Naturalism, have labeled the ultimate origins of Mind, Consciousness, and Language as a poetic mystery, instead of a topic for scientific analysis.: — Gnomon

The reason I call this view alarming is that it is hard to know what world picture to associate it with, and difficult to avoid the suspicion that the picture will be religious, or quasi-religious. Rationalism has always had a more religious flavor than empiricism. Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper--namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. — Thomas Nagel

Unless it [this analysis] is coupled with an independent basis for confidence in reason, the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening rather than reassuring. It is consistent with continued confidence only if it amounts to the hypothesis that evolution has led to the existence of creatures, namely us, with a capacity for reasoning in whose validity we can have much stronger confidence than would be warranted merely from its having come into existence in that way. I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct--not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so. But to believe that, I have to be justified independently in believing that they are correct. And this cannot be merely on the basis of my contingent psychological disposition, together with the hypothesis that it is the product of natural selection. I can have no justification for trusting a reasoning capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself -- that is, believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers. — Thomas Nagel