I get it- cultural taboo. I won't press the point, other than to say that Stevenson's publications constitute public evidence, although for obvious reasons, most people will be repelled, rather than compelled, by it. (For the curious.)

f. As for your "documented ... thousands of cases" of "past life memories", those anecdotes are not, in any rigorous sense, compelling public evidence. — 180 Proof

On the contrary, the researcher Ian Stevenson conducted many investigations into alleged cases. He followed the same kind of methodology that would be used for missing persons cases, epidemiological evidence, and so on. It is of course true that almost all his work is dismissed or rejected by the scientific community, and it is also possible that he was mistaken or tendentious in his approach, but having read some of the literature, I think it is not feasible to declare that all of it was simply mistaken. There were many cases - hundreds, in fact - where the purported memories described by the subject children were then checked against documentary evidence including newspaper reports, birth and death notices, and many other sources.

And the significance of that in this context is precisely because it is feasible to collect empirical evidence. If someone says 'I used to be called Sam and lived in a white house on a cross-roads with a flame tree beside it', and you find such a house, where a Sam used to live, prior to his death, then you at least have some actual empirical evidence. Do that several hundred times and a large amount of compelling public evidence is amassed.

I think there's a possible naturalistic explanation for past-life memories and re-birth. It is that humans bequeath future generations with the results of their actions in this life, and not only by way of what they leave in their will. They set in motion causes which continue to ripple outwards into the future. Those yet to be born are inheritors of these causal factors, just as we have inherited the consequences of our forbears' actions. Genetics is part of it, but only a part - as epigenetics shows, gene expression is a causal factor, and that relies on environmental influences. The only factor that is absent from the mainstream naturalist accounts of such a causal matrix is a subtle medium through which memories propogate. But it doesn't seem to great a stretch.

All the compelling public evidence — 180 Proof

We've often discussed the evidence of children with past-life recall, they have been documented in thousands of cases, but of course if you refuse to believe it, then none of that will be considered evidence, because, well, it just couldn't be true.

But I do understand that belief in nothingness is very soothing. Nothing to worry about, eh?

I like that Penrose is a kind of mathematical Platonist. One of his other Closer to Truth interviews is on that topic. In fact overall I really like Penrose, but there's a lot of what he says that I just can't understand.

You fundamentally implied you are not a monist?
You also implied you limit any type of mental aspect to living forms? — prothero

I'd best not get into that here, it's completely different from whatever it is that Roger Penrose is describing. But I do agree that his 'proto-consciousness' seems pretty close to panpsychism, and also that it might be compatible with process philosophy.

I am advising no one to throw himself out of the window because of a superman's fantasy in his head. — Raef Kandil

:up: 'Trust in Allah, but tether your camel first' ~ Arab proverb.

what can 'Perennialism' mean to – what existential role can (the) 'ultimate unity' play in – the ephemeral lives of discrete metacognitives like us, Wayfarer? — 180 Proof

From whence we come, wither we go. You gotta choose who to listen to.

How do you honestly distinguish between a fantasy and a non-fantasy. Honestly speaking, they all fall under one category: life experience. — Raef Kandil

But it's very important to distinguish them, especially in this day and age, with its proliferation of media and entire artificial fantasy realms into which you can be consumed. There's billions of young adults spending all their time playing computer games. And being able to make sense of experience and differentiate the real from the unreal is a critical life skill.

I think what you're trying to say is that even fictional characters have a kind of reality - which is true. It's also true that there are many elements of our inner world that are real, even if they don't have any outer existence. Many elements of the spiritual life are especially like this. But what's needed is to find an overall structure within which all these elements have a place.

Here's an example that comes to mind from my experience. I once did a course on Buddhist studies. This included the books of Steven Collins who is a scholar of Buddhist studies and who has written extensively on Pali literature and language (Pali being the traditional language of Theravada Buddhism.) He uses the term "the Pali imaginaire" to refer to the collective mental images, symbols, and themes that are commonly associated with Pali literature and the culture it represents. It is a set of texts, ideas and images that have been constructed over time through the interpretation and re-interpretation of the Pali texts, as well as through the transmission of Buddhist ideas across different cultures and historical contexts. It encompasses a wide range of concepts, including karma, rebirth, meditation, and the nature of the self, and is characterized by a distinctive blend of rationality, empiricism, and mystical insight.

The Pali imaginaire, he said, is not a static or fixed set of ideas, but rather a dynamic and evolving cultural phenomenon that reflects the ongoing dialogue between Pali literature and the societies in which it is read and studied.

This is very much what Karen Armstrong has in mind as a 'mythos'. It's not just myth in the pejorative sense of 'a story that isn't true', but a narrative structure which accomodates all of those elements of existence by giving them a kind of over-arching metaphorical or symbolic structure. The Greek Myths and the Christian mythos are others. Even in modern Western culture many of these themes surface through super-hero movies and the like (per Joseph Campell, 'Hero with a Thousand Faces', one of the main sources for Star Wars.)

That's where I would situate your undertaking.

I always appreciate your contribution, and I'm interested in improving my understanding of Whitehead and process philosophy, although you're right in saying that we come at these questions from highly divergent perspectives and it's a difficult division to navigate. I've been reading a book on philosophy of physics, Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin, which incorporates many of Whitehead's ideas. Still working through it.

You appear to have a view that there has been a kind of fall (paradise lost?) - that the numinous and integrated has been displaced by an ugly, modernist, secular, scientistic worldview, which has led us to nihilism and disenchantment. The evidence being our current, divided world and the coarseness of public discourse. — Tom Storm

Thanks, kind of you to say so. I guess that is a fair description, although not all there is to it.

If there is a transcendent ultimate concern, it will take care of itself and doesn't need us. — Tom Storm

Wouldn't be too sure of that.

I suppose to try and articulate my own stance a little better, I think the higher religious traditions - by that I'm referring to Christian Platonism, and what I know of Vedanta and Buddhism - are grounded in an insight into a genuine higher truth. Not just as a matter of belief or faith, although they may be instrumental in coming to understand it. But that in some sense, humanity is part of the unfolding of the cosmos - the way I put it is, that through sentient beings, the Universe comes to understand itself. That is an intuition that is even shared by at least some scientists. So I allow that any one of them might be valid pathway to coming to know those higher truths, which is why I too am pluralist. But these things are very deep, hard to fathom, so they're expressed in the language of signs and symbols - you can't simply spell them out or describe them, as they require a complete re-organisation of the personality in order to understand - hence my earlier reference to 'realisation' or 'self-realisation'. Those ideas are much better explained in Hindu and Buddhist schools than in mainstream Christianity, although they're also there if you know where to look. Faith is part of that, but ultimately it is something to be known directly, although that kind of understanding is not part of the lingua franca of today's culture.

And that's where the problem begins when that faith is foundational to mysogyny, homophobia, racism, anti-abortion and anti-birth control, etc. — Tom Storm

Agree that religion is often incompatible with liberalism, and also that religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the politicisation of faith that we see in e.g. the American Christian Right, are deeply problematical. And also that we have to live in a pluralistic society which has to acomodate many different perspectives.

The intuition that there's an invisible 'magic' creator thing... — Tom Storm

It's often the case that everyone understands something different by the name of God. There sure are a lot of religious believers I wouldn't have any truck with. In fact there's probably quite a few to whom I would come across as atheist, and I wouldn't even try to persuade them otherwise.

But I also believe there is a fact of existence that is over our limited cognitive horizons, which religions, at least sometimes, represent. I mean, not all religion is evil, although if your sole experience of it was through internet fora, you might be inclined to think so.

Faith is a belief largely or wholly unsupported by empirical evidence. — Vera Mont

You edited your answer after my previous response.

You seem to be arguing that just because something is lacking in empirical evidence, then there are no grounds to believe it. But empirical evidence is limited in scope by our own sensory apparatus and by the way we categorise experience - the structures we hold in terms of which things are interpreted. But there are many things to which empiricism doesn't apply. Consider mathematical axioms: certain mathematical truths, such as the axioms of arithmetic or geometry, must be accepted as true without empirical evidence. They are considered to be self-evident and can be derived from logic alone. Many hold that at least some moral principles, such as the belief that it is wrong to kill or harm others, even in the absence of empirical evidence, based on intuition, reason, or philosophical arguments. We can often deduce the truth of certain propositions from other propositions that we already accept as true without empirical evidence, or arrive at knowledge through a priori reasoning, which is reasoning that does not rely on empirical evidence.

I think it's more the case that modern culture has abandoned the structures and forms through which religious intuitions were previously expressed. There are whole classes of ideas which are then automatically flagged as being associated with religion - typically, as opposed to science - which are then designated as being the subject of faith and challenged on those grounds. It happens continuously in any threads here about philosophy of religion simply as an expression of the zeitgeist.

I would expect so!

How does this differ from some forms of panpsychism? In particular panexperientialism? — prothero

Hey great to hear from you Prothero. He does seem to be reaching for a kind of pan-psychist solution. (Incidentally, where did those passages come from?)

I perceive no essential dividing line between biology and physics (or between biology, chemistry, and physics)....such (putative) non-computational processes would also have to be inherent in the action of inanimate matter, since living human brains are ultimately composed of the same material, satisfying the same physical laws, as are the inanimate objects of the universe”. — Roger Penrose

And this I profoundly differ with. I'm more inclined to accept the basically Aristotelian distinction between the living and non-living, and also between the sentient and non-sentient (e.g. animal and vegetative) and rational and non-rational (human and animal). These signify fundamental differences as far as I'm concerned. Trying to attribute consciousness to matter or work out how it is that matter can be or become conscious seems mistaken to me. And the idea that everything is composed of a single substance is lumpen materialism (which I don't think Penrose actually advocates.)

I'll try and say what I feel is mistaken with Penrose's efforts in this regard. To me, he seems to be attempting to arrive at an objective account of the nature of consciousness (or mind). Whereas the way I see it, is that the mind (or consciousness or awareness) are not known to us as an object of experience (in the way that all material objects are, being spatially located and sense-able). Of course, I can infer all kinds of things about the nature of mind or consciousness through objective analysis within the scope of cognitive science, but what consciousness is, its essential nature, as the ground or basis of experience, is another matter. It seems to me that Step 1 in the investigation is acknowledging that limitation, which is a problem in principle, not simply a matter of acquiring more data.

Of course not all of it is bullshit. But some of it is. And it, and the reader, cannot tell which is which. Hence it is not an authoritative source. — Banno

You know, I could quite easily have included that entire passage without any attribution whatever. I included the attribution for transparency. I suppose I could have read a bunch more material by and about Penrose so as to write a couple of hundred words of original text, but there are only so many hours in a day. And as I said, it does provide at least some elaboration of what Penrose means by proto-consciousness (which incidentally I am highly dubious of, as it happens.)

Most faith, then is dependent on reason? — Vera Mont

In many religious discourses, they are seen as complementary rather than antagonistic. Aquinas is an example. His articles are nearly always given in terms of reasoned arguments for and against the subject of the discussion.

I know as much as I will ever need to know about your pathological aversion to all things religious, 180. You can really spare me the ongoing explanation. I'm trying to steer this particular OP towards a mode of discourse which is understandable in the context of philosophy of religion.

The idea that everything that it generates is bullshit is also bullshit. It is a convenient information source for summaries and sketches and I will continue to use it as I see fit, end of argument.

Of course it's not a f*ing authority. What it is, is a little more detail than a one-sentence question, for the benefit of others, who are quite welcome to do their own research and make their own contributions. :angry:

It's like a Wikipedia entry. (Besides the video link was to Penrose himself, explaining it in his own words.) If you want to read what he says, get Emperor's New Mind. If I can find my copy, I'll mail it to you, I couldn't make head or tail.

Indeed. Had some of the gnostics prevailed, it might have been a very different story. But let's not throw the baby of gnosis out with the bathwater of dogmatic belief systems.

They're deep questions, and Penrose is an exceptionally deep thinker. I bought his book The Emperor's New Mind years ago, and it was way over my head. (I notice that he says in this interview that the book actually failed, which is kind of a relief!) I've also seen his collaborator, Stuart Hameroff, present at a conference - you can find his interview here (LINK CORRECTED) - and couldn't make a lot of sense out of what he said, either. I'll leave it for others to comment further.

set aside this bias... — noAxioms

My trying to explain a philosophical view to you is not 'bias'. It's a philosophical view.

The way sentience affects the interaction of things is irrelevant to an ontology not based on sentience. — noAxioms

So, an ontology not based on sentience is described as what? Where in the philosophy text books or science textbooks do you find a description of such an ontology?

Penrose always says the Universe is not conscious, but that proto-consciousness is a fundamental property of it. Now I'm a bit confused. — Eugen

I'm just providing a bit more detail from ChatGPT to provide some background:

Roger Penrose, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, has proposed the idea of "proto-consciousness" as a potential explanation for how consciousness arises in the brain.

According to Penrose, proto-consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe that exists independently of the brain. It is a non-computable aspect of the universe that has the potential to influence brain function and give rise to conscious experience.

In Penrose's view, proto-consciousness is a property of the universe that is related to the collapse of the quantum wave function, which is the process by which a quantum system goes from a superposition of states to a definite state when it is observed or measured. Penrose has proposed that the collapse of the wave function is not a purely random process but is influenced by proto-consciousness, which he believes is a fundamental property of the universe.

According to Penrose, proto-consciousness interacts with the brain in a way that enables conscious experience to arise. He suggests that the brain acts as a kind of "receiver" for proto-consciousness, which influences neural activity and gives rise to conscious experience.

It is important to note that the idea of proto-consciousness is still a highly speculative hypothesis and has not been widely accepted within the scientific community. It is an area of ongoing research and debate, and further study is needed to fully understand the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. — ChatGPT

You can also find an interview with Sir Roger Penrose in which he explains this here.

My view is, based on the interview, that Penrose is saying something very close to: 'Hey, consciousness is a real mystery. And so is the collapse of the probability wave. Maybe they're related!' :razz:

That incidentally is fideism.
— Wayfarer
AKA faith. — Vera Mont

No, fideism is not the same as faith. Fideism is the belief that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and that faith is superior to reason. You see that in many religious cultures, but it's not uniform across any of them. It's relevant to Protestantism due to its emphasis on salvation by faith. But even so, there are Prostestant philosophers of religion (such as Alvin Plantinga) who scrupulously deploy rational arguments in defense of their faith. (Not to mention Thomas Aquinas.)

Religions are not all formed in the same way. Social situations and people interaction tend to be more complex than that. And generalisation is not what I attempted to do People are very complex beings and multi-faceted. — Raef Kandil

:up: That's the sense in which many atheist critics of religion hold to their own type of fundamentalism.

If you define faith as belief that comes from certain acceptable sources, how then do you determine whether a belief is faith or non-faith? Can you really know the full extent of the sources that feed into your beliefs? If so, do you then deny the existence of the sub-conscious? — Ø implies everything

That's something I'd like to chip in on. It's pretty clear that secular culture generally accepts that science is the sole source of valid knowledge, the 'umpire of reality', so to speak. But there are many open questions and conundrums, both within science itself (like the various knowledge gaps in physics and cosmology, the hard problem of consciousness, and so on) and in respect of the limitations of scientific method itself (with its basic reliance on objectivity and quantification). So we might be willing to acknowledge that science can't answer every question, but at the same time declare that as religion is grounded in the supernatural (whatever that is!) then it, too, is off the table. Leading to something like a kind of agnostic relativism, which I'm sure is the default for a lot of people.

As much as I respect Karen Armstrong's writings on religion, I find their revisionary departures from scholarship undermine her credibility as a scholar (who pretends not to be latter day apologist). — 180 Proof

Her point, in that OP and elaborated in her book The Case for God, is that in modern culture, religious faith has too often become a matter of commitment to abstract propositions, rather than a way of enacting the truths of faith through service and way of life. And that there are forms of understanding and dimensions of being that can only be 'learned by doing', so to speak (opening up to which is the role of 'mythos', in her account). But then on internet fora, everything that transpires is simply a clash between abstract propositions. :roll:

All I am saying is: religion and faith are totally different things — Raef Kandil

They’re not totally different although I do see the distinction you are wanting to make. Here’s another outlink (I have many!) which distinguishes religion from dharma

http://veda.wikidot.com/dharma-and-religion

Because it involves a factor variously designated salvation, release, mokṣa, or liberation. Whereas there’s nothing in the current concept of naturalism that corresponds to that.

An incontestable conclusion. — Vera Mont

That incidentally is fideism.

There are many deeply stereotyped ideas about religion which mainly originate in ecclesiastical dogma about what you are obliged to believe. I think this the issue the OP is trying to elaborate.

me neither :up:

An important point that is largely lost in Western cultural discourse is the principle of self-realization in the philosophical or spiritual sense.

Suffice to say that Asian culture has maintained the connection between philosophical insight and praxis - you see that very clearly in Tibetan Buddhism but it's also true of other Asian Buddhist schools, such as Zen and Tendai. It comprises an insight into and realization of the unity of being and knowing - to put it in rather Aristotelian terms. But this insight can't be captured or described in terms of propositional knowledge as it is something that has to be realized in actual life (and actualised in the figure of the sage or spiritual master). The crucial error in Western culture was to attempt to reduce it to propositional knowledge on par with (but inferior to) empirical or natural science.

Karen Armstrong has traced those developments in her book The Case for God (which is not a text of religious apologetics although of course a lot of people won't be able to see it any other way). See her OP, Metaphysical Mistake.

Moksa is a classic form of nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. — Joshs

At least Schopenhauer had some idea of the meaning of it.

Herewith the online dictionary account of the etymology of ‘intelligence’. Notice the element of judgement - 'to choose, to pick out'.

intelligence (n.)
late 14c., "the highest faculty of the mind, capacity for comprehending general truths;" c. 1400, "faculty of understanding, comprehension," from Old French intelligence (12c.) and directly from Latin intelligentia, intellegentia "understanding, knowledge, power of discerning; art, skill, taste," from intelligentem (nominative intelligens) "discerning, appreciative," present participle of intelligere "to understand, comprehend, come to know," from assimilated form of inter "between" (see inter-) + legere "choose, pick out, read," from PIE root *leg- (1) "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak (to 'pick out words')."

In summary, the distinction between human "true" understanding and the understanding demonstrated by AI systems like GPT-4 lies in the presence of consciousness, self-awareness, and intentionality. While AI systems can generate contextually appropriate and coherent responses, they do so through pattern recognition and statistical associations rather than conscious thought or intentional mental states. — GPT4

:up:

Meanwhile, on the seamy underside

https://futurism.com/the-byte/man-starts-business-chatgpt

He never had the moxie for moska. — Tom Storm

:rofl: :100:

If we were to say "time is circular", then what could that mean other than events reoccurring? — jorndoe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return

Various flavours of nihilism. Ought to inspire one to seek mokṣa.

The advocate of the system reply however argues that the process as a whole, and hence the Chinese room as a whole, rather than the man who executes the low level algorithm, manifests understanding of the Chinese language through its emergent (and competent) verbal behavior, and thereby displays genuine intelligence. — Pierre-Normand

But whoever designed the room does understand Chinese, otherwise he or she would not be able to implement it. Any understanding that is manifested is, then, attributable to the creator of the system.

Just for fun, I asked GPT4's younger brother what she made of this line of analysis

Q Do you think that Searle's Chinese Room thought-experiment provides an accurate analogy for the way ChatGPT operates?

A. As an AI language model, ChatGPT operates using complex algorithms and deep learning techniques that allow it to generate responses to user input. While there are similarities between ChatGPT and the Chinese Room scenario in terms of the processing of symbols and the generation of responses, there are also some key differences.

One of the main differences is that ChatGPT is capable of learning and adapting to new information over time, whereas the person in the Chinese Room scenario is simply following a set of instructions. ChatGPT is also able to process vast amounts of data and make connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information, which is something that would be impossible for a human to do on their own.

Furthermore, ChatGPT is not programmed to simply manipulate symbols in a book, but rather it is trained on large amounts of human-generated text in order to learn the nuances of language and communication. This allows it to generate responses that are often more sophisticated and contextually appropriate than the responses that would be possible through simple symbol manipulation.

Overall, while there are some similarities between the Chinese Room scenario and the way ChatGPT operates, the differences between the two mean that the analogy is not entirely accurate. — ChatGPT

consensus was, leave it, as there have been responses already. I'm not suggesting deletion because of the subject matter, only on the grounds of quality, or absence thereof.

I am not sure why is my arguments not clear or they lead to meaningless internet blather — Raef Kandil

It's been explained to you by fdrake, above. I suggest you read his post carefully and see if you can implement his suggestions.

Since Hubble and now JWT, there are plenty of exoplanets whose existence can be inferred from the data. But they're all so distant that their existence has no real significance, other than as scientific data.

The way this question is phrased amounts to meaningless internet blather. There may be a legitimate philosophical issue at stake, but the wording is poor and the reasoning specious. I'm flagging the thread for deletion.

:up:

JWT spots dust storm on exoplanet.

Researchers observing with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have pinpointed silicate cloud features in a distant planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is constantly rising, mixing, and moving during its 22-hour day, bringing hotter material up and pushing colder material down. The resulting brightness changes are so dramatic that it is the most variable planetary-mass object known to date. The team, led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, also made extraordinarily clear detections of water, methane and carbon monoxide with Webb’s data, and found evidence of carbon dioxide. This is the largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-105

And another interesting astronomy story although not connected to JWT

Organic molecules have been detected in samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 mission from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/21/world/ryugu-asteroid-organic-molecules-scn/index.html

As a longtime fan of the Panspermia thesis, can’t help but be interested.