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.

Sometimes it really does seem to be trying to impress or to please. So it tries to fill in the blanks with a best guess, which is dangerously close to bullshitting at times. And as it has obviously been programmed to speak in the vernacular, one handy phrase it could make much better use of is ‘Gee, I don’t know’.

I will add, what is meant by 'mind' is something much greater than simply the contents of an individual's conscious thought. Conscious thought and internal mentation are the merest sliver on top of the biological, physical and psychological complex which constitutes the human being. So I don't mean that the world is like an image in the individual mind or a product of the individual's imagination. Nothing like that. We are intelligent beings whose minds synthesise and incorporate information from a huge range of sources perceptual, sensational, and rational (which is why we are designated 'beings'). From this, the mind generates the unified whole which comprises reality for us, and all of science takes place against that background of unified perceptive and rational experience. Whatever judgement we make about objects of experience is made against that background - but that background, 'the mind' in the deepest sense, is not itself amongst those objects.

On Physics and Philosophy by Bernard D'Espagnat — Manuel

How did that strike you? As I mentioned I took it out of the library but didn't make a lot of headway. But he seems to be one of the 'idealist physicist' genre, so I'm pre-disposed in his favour.

But to stretch this to imply "there is no existence without mind" seems a tad sketchy. — jgill

I agree my way of putting it seems pretty blunt, but I've read the book thoroughly, and he makes the case quite convincingly, in my view (although I'll acknowledge he doesn't make that exact statement). But there are physicists who do - among them a Richard Conn Henry, 'Academy Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, author of one book and over 200 publications on the topics of astrophysics and various forms of astronomy including optical, radio, ultraviolet, and X-ray.' He arrived at an idealist point of view through his own reflection on, and knowledge of, physics, as he spells out in his 2005 editorial, The Mental Universe ( Nature). And there are others.

Of course, I understand that a lot of people will see this as a form of madness (and I think I even understand why they would see it that way.) But that is why I said there's necessary shift of perspective involved. It doesn't mean what most people think that it actually means.

Things are not looking so good for Trump and he looks it. — Fooloso4

Aside from trying to exploit his notoriety to part suckers from their money, Trump is fantasising about the spectacle of being forced into the 'perp walk':

Donald J. Trump claims he is ready for his perp walk.

Behind closed doors at Mar-a-Lago, the former president has told friends and associates that he welcomes the idea of being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters and news cameras. He has even mused openly about whether he should smile for the assembled media, and he has pondered how the public would react and is said to have described the potential spectacle as a fun experience. ...

As he waits for a likely criminal indictment — making him the first current or former American president to face criminal charges — Mr. Trump has often appeared significantly disconnected from the severity of his potential legal woes, according to people who have spent time with him in recent days. He has been spotted zipping around his Palm Beach resort in his golf cart and on one recent evening acted as D.J. at a party with his personally curated Spotify playlists, which often include music from the Rolling Stones to “The Phantom of the Opera.” — NY Times

He's clearly delusional, but what's depressing is the number of people who get pulled along in the slipstream.

I looked at the website for Mind and the Cosmic Order, but it requires an "institutional subscription". — Gnomon

True, you can only access the chapter abstracts on the site, but the abstracts for the first few chapters convey the gist. I bought the Kindle edition.

"the world would be mathematical if only reality didn't mess it up". — Gnomon

Because we're intermixed with base matter, would be my guess.

What are your thoughts on existential Transcendence? — Gnomon

That if you don't know what it is you're seeking, you have no hope of finding.

This is similar to how congenitally blind individuals can discuss the visual appearance of things using abstract concepts and language, despite not having direct visual experiences themselves." — GPT4

Thereby not only blowing the Turing Test out of the water, but also Mary's Room. :lol:

It really has amazing functionality. This seems to me to be about on par with the invention of the World Wide Web.

I asked for a different word to describe the interaction between the moon and rock, but none was offered. ‘Interaction’ seems reasonable, and I’ve tried to use that since. Hence:
The rock interacts (a one-way interaction) with the moon as much as I do, and so the moon exists to the rock. — noAxioms

The relationship between two such masses is defined solely in terms of gravitational attraction. The way sentient beings interact with the moon is through the mind and the senses, which rocks don't possess. So it's not a valid analogy.

What I'm arguing is that there is no existence without mind and that the nature of the universe outside any mind is unintelligible and unknowable. That's why I keep referring to the book Mind and the Cosmic Order, which is not a philosophy book, but a book about neural modelling. If you simply scan the chapter abstracts you'll see the point, which is actually rather simple, but requires something of a gestalt shift.

If we're going around in circles, it's because you continue to insist that, no, there is a universe that would exist, even if there was no mind at all to behold it. And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to believe, in fact most people would agree with you. However, I don't agree with it, for the reasons I have been stating.

Anyway, I appreciate your patience, and also the opportunity to have had this discussion. :pray:

I wish to hell it would just happen. This interminable will-they-or-won't they is driving me nuts. I want to wake up to the morning news (here in Aus) to the headline 'Trump Arrested, Released on Strict Bail Conditions'. Until then, I'm tuning out.

although I can't help but add that:

Leading Republicans have joined Donald Trump in a fundraising frenzy to boost their campaign war chests ahead of his possible indictment over alleged hush money paid to a porn star

Trump is the actual prostitute.

The explanation of uncertainty as arising through the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement process has provided physicists with a useful intuitive guide as well as a powerful explanatory framework in certain specific situations. However, it can also be misleading. It may give the impressions that uncertainly only arises when we lumbering experimenters meddle with things. This is not true. Uncertainty is built into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we carry out some clumsy measurement. ...Since the wave is uniformly spread throughout space, there is no way for us to say the electron is here or there. ...And this conclusion does not depend on our disturbing the particle. We never touched it. Instead it relies on a basic feature of waves - they can be spread out. — Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

You denied my saying that the moon existed relative to a rock because I used words you feel can only be used for human intentful actions. — noAxioms

It's not the words you used, but their meaning, which I'm disputing. What you actually said was

A rock measures the moon as much as I do, and so the moon exists to the rock.

and I disputed the idea that rock measures anything, and also that the expression that 'the moon exists to the rock' is meaningless. //Both 'measurement' and 'existing for' imply intentionality, which both the moon and the rock are devoid of. Why they're devoid of intentionality is not a matter of vocabulary but of metaphysics (or more specifically of ontology).

But firstly, naturalism does not necessarily imply objective realism even though most of the time it does. — noAxioms

It certainly does. Objectivity is the touchstone for naturalism, what is objectively the case, what is truly so irrespective of what anyone thinks. Again, the whole problem here is that this is what has been called into question. Otherwise there would no 'problem of interpretation.'

While Rödl's framework may be useful in identifying some parallels between human self-consciousness and AI-generated behavior, the fundamental differences between human cognition and AI processing should not be overlooked. — GPT4

All that insight, plus modesty! What's not to like?

(I often reflect on the prescience which led Isaac Asimov to name his 1960's anthology, "I, Robot".)

Fascinating. I’ve been using ChatGPT regularly, I will try the next version. At this point, the only observation I have is to wonder about the soundness of programming the system to use the first-person pronoun, ‘I’. I’ve noticed that in journalism, most journalists, if they need to introduce themselves into a piece, will say ‘this journalist’ (e.g. ‘a witness told this journalist…’), and also that the outlet they write for will usually be described without self-reference (e.g. ‘this masthead previously reported….’) I would have thought that adoption of this convention would be highly appropriate for this technology and it would read practically the same way:

However, once the conversation ends, I do not retain GPT4 does not retain any information about it, and cannot recall it cannot be recalled in future conversations.

Just consider that a footnote.

Especially impressive was the ‘now you mention it’ response. Spooky.

It seems to me that subjective idealism requires a level of skepticism that should also put the existence of other minds and the findings of empiricism in doubt, in which case it becomes only arbitrarily distinct from solipsism....In Kastrup's system, external objects are indeed external to us, they are just composed of mental substance — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I elaborate extensively in my new book, The Idea of the World, none of this implies solipsism. The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism. — Bernardo Kastrup

I take seriously the conclusion of quantum theorists that abstract analog Information is equivalent to Energy. — Gnomon

I notice that the Information as a basic property of the Universe abstract says that 'Pure energy can perform no 'useful' (entropy reducing) work without a concomitant input of information' - but what is the source of that information? (I've found a brief profile of Tom Stonier here - quite an interesting fellow, but I am dubious that what he's saying really can be reduced to physics. There are any number of ID theorists who would exploit Stonier's observation by saying "well, you know who the source of that "information" must be" - not that I would endorse them. See The Argument from Biological Information.)

As a passage from the Kastrup OP you link to says:

Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory....Information remains an elusive concept.

And it is what Kastrup disputes as 'hand-waving word games'.

I’m asking for vocabulary that you would accept in describing parts of the world that are not in a laboratory or anywhere else where attention is being paid by some human. — noAxioms

And I'm saying, it's not a matter of vocabulary. The question is one of metaphysics.

From a naturalistic perspective, it is perfectly sound to presume that the laws and objects of physics obtain independently of any observer - Wayfarer
This statement contradicts your assertion that the word ‘physics’ implies a human endeavor and thus cannot ‘obtain independently of any observer’. It seems that you use the word that way, but refuse to let me do it. — noAxioms

What I'm saying is, that from the perspective of natural philosophy, it is perfectly sound to presume....etc. What I'm arguing is that naturalism presumes that the world would exist, just as it appears to us, even without there being an observer - and that, for pragmatic purposes, this is a sound assumption. But quantum physics challenges that assumption because it calls the purported mind-independent nature of reality into question. That's what the debate is about!

I...cannot accept anything where the operation of the universe is different for humans than it is for anything else. — noAxioms

You still require that we can arrive at a description of a truly mind-independent reality.

I think the free-and-easy depiction of Zen Buddhism propagated by popular books in the West is nothing like the lived reality.

Those few who took the trouble to visit Japan and begin the practice of Zen under a recognized Zen master or who joined the monastic Order soon discovered that it was a very different matter from what the popularizing literature had led them to believe. They found that in the traditional Zen monastery zazen is never divorced from the daily routine of accessory disciplines. To attenuate and finally dissolve the illusion of the individual ego, it is always supplemented by manual work to clean the temple, maintain the garden, and grow food in the grounds; by strenuous study with attendance at discourses on the sutras and commentaries; and by periodical interviews with the roshi, to test spiritual progress. Acolytes are expected to develop indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold on a most frugal vegetarian diet and to abstain from self-indulgence in sleep and sex, intoxicating drinks and addictive drugs. Altogether Zen demands an ability to participate in a communal life as regimented and lacking in privacy as the army. — Harold Stewart

From here

"Pushed up against this edge, science often retreats into platonism" — Gnomon

'Philosophy buries its undertakers' ~ Etienne Gilson

I doubt that Western science is seriously challenged by the notion of Eastern self-transcendence — Gnomon

It's more like becoming absorbed by it. Deepak Chopra is a regular at the Consciousness Studies conferences held at the University of Arizona. The Tao of Physics was published in 1970. There are many memes and themes that have seeped through from Eastern culture into current science.

Fire In The Mind (1995), by science writer George Johnson — Gnomon

Does look a very interesting read.

I again recommend Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter.

From the OP review:

I—and very many others—have admired you as a philosopher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man, for it contradicts your own philosophy. A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews—merely because they were Jews—that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the idea of spirit, freedom, and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the Western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culmination—in this case too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition. — Herbert Marcuse, August 28th, 1947

:clap:

Reification is when you think of or treat something abstract as a physical thing." I'm not suggesting thoughts are physical; merely, that they are pre-existent. And picturing the mindscape as a place is merely metaphor. The claim is all thoughts are pre-existent (just as the trees we encounter when we walk in a forest are pre-existent). — Art48

:up: I think what you're groping towards is reflected in some aspects of Platonism, which I've already implicitly stated, but it's worth spelling it out. It revolves around the belief in the reality of the Platonic ideas, or more generally, universals, which are held to explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals, classroom examples being the redness common to both rubies and apples, which are in all other respects completely different.

In this connection it's worth reading Bertrand Russell's chapter in The Problems of Philosophy called The World of Universals, from which:

In addition to our acquaintance with particular existing things, we also have acquaintance with what we shall call universals, that is to say, general ideas, such as whiteness, diversity, brotherhood, and so on. Every complete sentence must contain at least one word which stands for a universal, since all verbs have a meaning which is universal.

He then gives these examples:

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ...We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ... In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.

We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. — Bertrand Russell

My bolds.

Another place you find discussion of universals in contemporary terms is in Ed Feser's books and blog site. Have a browse of Think, McFly, Think.

I don't think you could call this a 'mindscape' but it shows that a fundamental element of reason, namely predication, is only understandable through a cognitive act. In other words, when we grasp a concept, we're seeing commonalities (and differences) between whole classes of things - and, as Russell says, they not the product of thought, but can only be grasped by reason. And that kind of ability is essential to language, and so to discursive thought generally. That's what I think you're looking for.

I disagree with "...whatever scientists discover, through whatever methodologies they employ, will never be an understanding of reality itself"; because "constructing helpful conceptual models for engaging with it" is exactly understanding reality itself. — Banno

:down:

Transcendence & Metaphysics are inherently doubtful, and must be supported by reasoning instead of experimentation. — Gnomon

The crucial point that is largely lost in Western cultural traditions is the idea - although it's not an idea - of self-realization in the philosophical or spiritual sense. It is very difficult to define and so plain-language philosophers will always use this to argue that it is meaningless, which is a big part of the problem.

Suffice to say that Asian culture has maintained the connection between philosophical analysis 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 once again in rather Aristotelian terms. But this insight can't be captured or described in propositional terms, as it is something that has to be actualised. The crucial error in Western culture is 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.

Kant's Antinomies might best be seen as a nascent version of the realisation that logic, on it's own, does not lead to any conclusions. — Banno

Kant’s constructivist foundation for scientific knowledge restricts science to the realm of appearances and implies that transcendent metaphysics – i.e., a priori knowledge of things in themselves that transcend possible human experience – is impossible. In the Critique Kant thus rejects the insight into an intelligible world that he defended in the Inaugural Dissertation, and he now claims that rejecting knowledge about things in themselves is necessary for reconciling science with traditional morality and religion. This is because he claims that belief in God, freedom, and immortality have a strictly moral basis, and yet adopting these beliefs on moral grounds would be unjustified if we could know that they were false. “Thus,” Kant says, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Bxxx). Restricting knowledge to appearances and relegating God and the soul to an unknowable realm of things in themselves guarantees that it is impossible to disprove claims about God and the freedom or immortality of the soul, which moral arguments may therefore justify us in believing. — SEP

Some notes:

If you take Kant seriously about all of this, then his perspective has some very important implications. One is this: whatever scientists discover, through whatever methodologies they employ, will never be an understanding of reality itself. At best, science will be the project of describing in painstaking detail the world of appearances (what Kant called the empirical world) and constructing helpful conceptual models for engaging with it in ways that, we might say, decrease the frequency with which we are surprised. — Eric Reitan

(That is why Kant can describe himself as both an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist; there are two perspectives, one of which is almost always rejected, or not recognised, by naturalism.)

And

Both (Schleiermacher and Hegel) thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience.

So: the self that has experiences is a noumenal reality. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel believed that this fact could be made use of, so that somehow the self could serve as a wedge to pry open a doorway through the wall of mystery, into an understanding of reality as it is in itself. — Eric Reitan

Wittgenstein, of course, took a contrary view to Augustin as to how we learn a language, treating it as becoming a participant in the activities of a community. — Banno

It's reductionist, though. And it's also a lot like the empiricist criticisms of mathematics (i.e. Mill) that we become familiar with numerical concepts by using them. But if you're a creature that can't form concepts of numbers, then no amount of experience will imbue you with that ability. We are endowed with reason - of course an Augustine would say that was God-given, whereas we think it is probably a consequence of evolutionary adaptation. But even so, the abilities it provides go well beyond those that can be explained merely in terms of adaptation (hence also my scepticism about Donald Hoffman).

There's a book I've noticed, Jerrold Katz, The Metaphysics of Meaning. (Reviews here and here). This book, and indeed most of Katz' career, was dedicated to critiquing Wittgenstein, Quine, and 'naturalised epistemology' generally. He also studied under Chomsky, but I think the basic drift is Platonist, i.e. meaning has to be anchored in recognition of universals as constitutive elements of reason - not simply conventions or habits of speech.

Question: once created, are ideas and thoughts eternal? Can an idea cease to exist? Can an idea “die”? — Art48

There needs to be a degree of rigor in formulating such an idea. Our minds are constantly occupied by a stream of thoughts, some vocalised, some comprising imagery or awareness of sensations and drives. And so on. So when you speak of an 'idea' it has to be something more than simply a passing thought or whatever pops up in your inner dialogue from moment to moment.

Having said that, I'm sure that there are at least some ideas as 'constitutive elements of reason'. There are principles that any sentient rational being might be expected to have discovered - such as the law of the excluded middle and other logical principles. Many fundamental arithmetical principles must be similar - this is the sense in which they are said to be 'true in all possible worlds'. That kind of statement must be logically necessary and true in every conceivable scenario, regardless of the particular circumstance. How far that extends is obviously a vexed question, subject of many unsolveable debates in philosphy of mathematics. But I'm impressed by the Platonist view that there is a vast domain of logical necessity and that it is not a product of, but a discovery made by, the mind.

'Intelligible objects must be independent of particular minds because they are common to all who think. In coming to grasp them, an individual mind does not alter them in any way, it cannot convert them into its exclusive possessions or transform them into parts of itself. Moreover, the mind discovers them rather than forming or constructing them, and its grasp of them can be more or less adequate.' - Cambridge Companion to Augustine.

As to whether there might be a specific play called 'Macbeth' in the absence of humans, I would say obviously not. But I would also say, were there other species of sapient beings in the Universe, they might produce something corresponding to drama, exploring the same themes as those found in Shakespeare. This is the idea behind Joseph Campbell's studies of comparative mythology - that archetypal themes tend to come up again and again in different cultures, even if their specific expressions are culturally-conditioned and hugely diverse.

So there's an interplay between some constitutive elements, and other elements, which might be creative or novel or unpredictable - it's not an all-or-nothing proposition.

(See also Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge.)

:ok: That's real treasurehouse!

we lack for vocabulary since ‘measurement’ and ‘physics’ are both human undertakings and apparently cannot be used for interactions not involving humans.
What do you call the actual mechanisms of the universe, as opposed to ‘physics’, the human undertaking to describe it? What would you call an interaction between systems of which humans are completely unaware, say where one system (some radioactive atom) emits an alpha particle which alters a second system (some molecule somewhere) by altering its molecular structure (and probably heating up the material of which the molecule is part). It isn’t a measurement because there’s no intent and no numerical result yielded, so what word describes this exchange between the atom and the molecule? — noAxioms

You’re asking for a description of the world that is not described by physics. Such an undertaking would fall under the general heading of metaphysics, wouldn't it?

Given your definitions... — noAxioms

The definition of counter-factual definiteness I provided was generated by ChatGPT. Granted, ChatGPT is no all-knowing oracle, but I felt it to be a reasonable summary.

Alternatively, you perhaps suggest an epistemological definition of counter-factual definiteness, where in the absence of human measurement/observation, humans would not know of the thing, and existence is defined by human knowledge of it. Hence, again, by definition, nothing can exist in the absence of humans since no human could know of it. Counter-factual definiteness is therefore false either way.

Correct me where I’ve misinterpreted what you’ve been trying to tell me. — noAxioms

Grappling with the distinctions you're providing between various types of interpretation is quite a challenge - not that there's anything wrong with them, but there's a lot to take in, and I think you're better read in them than I am. But there is probably more detail in those diverse interpretations than is required by the broadly idealist view that I'm trying to advocate. Which is that - whatever we construe existence to be, it contains a mental or subjective pole or aspect, which is not in itself disclosed amongst the objects of scientific analysis. From a naturalistic perspective, it is perfectly sound to presume that the laws and objects of physics obtain independently of any observer, but the lesson of quantum physics is that this is not ultimately so, but that the observer retains a central role. And why this is, is not itself a scientific question, but a metaphysical one.

One of the text books I've been consulting on this is Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin. He advocates an idealist interpretation which he says is consistent with Western philosophy (unlike the other authors on this subject who appeal to Eastern philosophy. You can find a profile of Malin here).

Then the measurement takes place and a "collapse" occurs giving a particular solution. Did the measurement "do something" to the system, or does one simply experiment to find the appropriate value of the constant? Where is the magic? — jgill

That is indeed the measurement problem in a nutshell. The act of observation is not described by the equations but appears central to the outcome. That is what the many-worlds interpretation seeks to explain away. But nobody has a definitive or unanimous solution - hence the debate!

Simply that appearances can deceive, after all

I agree that your last two posts are very odd. Perhaps in future you might take a moment to gather your thoughts before typing them.

...them... — invicta

I'd discourage the use of personal pronouns in respect of artificial intelligence systems.

Q: Can AI systems be considered sentient?

A: Currently, AI systems are not sentient. While they are capable of processing vast amounts of data and making decisions based on that data, they do not have consciousness or self-awareness. Sentience implies the ability to feel, perceive, and experience the world subjectively, which AI systems do not possess.

However, there is ongoing research into developing AI systems that can mimic human emotions and behavior to a certain degree, such as chatbots that can simulate empathy in conversations. But even these systems do not truly possess sentience as they do not have a subjective experience of the world.

Therefore, while AI systems may be capable of performing tasks that previously required human intelligence, they are not sentient beings. — ChatGPT

From the metaphorical horses' mouth ;-)

Thisness—which is also known by medieval philosophers as haecceity — Jamal

Tathata, which means "suchness" or "thusness," is term used primarily in Mahāyāna Buddhism to denote "reality," or "the way things truly are". It's understood that the true nature of reality is ineffable, beyond description and conceptualization.

Tathata is the root of Tathagata, which is an alternate term for "Buddha." Tathagata was the term the historical Buddha used most often to refer to himself. Tathagata can mean either "one who has thus come" or "one who has thus gone." It is sometimes translated "one who is such."

Tathata is used interchangeably with śūnyatā to denote the true nature.

I can't help but also notice the resonances with Heidegger's 'presencing'.

Outside the web of discursive thought and conceptualisation.

Fair point. But it's still a stretch to say you can imagine a world without good and evil - perhaps an uninhabited planet might fit the bill, but then, so what?

I think the philosophical point is that the capacity for evil - both to experience it and to cause it - is an integral part of self-conscious being. It may be true that earthquakes and natural catastrophes aren't evil, and that a world inhabited only by snails would be devoid of evil - but again, so what?

'Atheists are those who stil feel the weight of their chains' ~ Albert Einstein

Yes, good and evil obviously exist, but we can easily imagine a world where it doesn't. — ClayG

You can? What would that be like, then? A world where nothing is ever born or dies, is subject to illness or injury. I can't see how this can be 'easy to imagine'.

There were many ancient religious cults that had such teachings - various forms of gnosticism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism. A lot of people still believe it.

I tend more towards the idea of evil as privation of the good. Evil is not something that exists on its own, but rather the absence of a good. Blindness is not a thing in itself, but is simply the lack of the ability to see. Disease is the absence of health, but it has no reality independently of health. Similarly, evil is seen as the lack of some good quality or attribute that ought to be present.

A lot to mull over there. I only want to add that from my brief readings about the principle of magic, the ideas of sympathy and symbol are central to it. Sympathy is the resemblances and common ground of apparently separate objects and beings, so that something done with or to one over here, has effects on the other over there. As if they are entangled, somehow :chin: . They are 'cut from the same cloth' so to speak, and so not really separate things. Part of the reason this is inimical to post-Enlightenment culture is its conception of reality - its metaphysic - in terms solely of objects driven by mechanical force, and of scientific power over those forces as the only significant form of power.

As for symbolic form, symbols, such as talismans and amulets, are used to convey, embody and invoke powers and states. In secular culture they turn up as logos and signs of cultural identity, but in traditional cultures they are invocations of the sacred.

Obviously many of these themes are writ large in counter-cultural philosophy and environmentalism - James Lovelock's Gaia theory is a return to a kind of magical thinking.

kudos for knowing

A Platonist riddle:

'A man (not a man)
throws a stone (not a stone)
At a bird (not a bird)
in a tree (not a tree)'

What is it a description of?

It 'really' has branches and leaves because we made it that way and how we make it is how it 'really' is. — Isaac

It still is something completely different to a termite, a forester, and a koala. And none of them are mistaken.

Snakes are symbols of treachery and deceit throughout Western culture, near to the ground, symbolizing abasement, their poison symbolizing death. But they are worshipped as symbols of divine power in Eastern traditions:

Iconographic representation of Nāgārjuna, 'Lord of Nagas'

The Prajñāpāramitā teachings of Buddhism were said to have been retrieved by Nāgārjuna from the realm of the Nagas, having been guarded there from the time of the parinirvana of Buddha, awaiting a suitable audience. (I wonder what C G Jung would make of that - perhaps a symbol of the unconscious, and the hazards awaiting those who chose to explore it, transmuted here into guardians by Nagarjuna's insight.)