Nice of you to say so, but I consider myself more 'casual reader' than 'expert' :yikes:

The aspect of this argument that most perplexes me is the suggestion that all objects possess subjectivity - for that is panpsychicm, which to my knowledge is not associated with Schopenhauer (where it can plausibly be with Spinoza and Liebniz). I think the passage quoted by @Jamal really nails it - that the sole real existent is will: 'Besides the will and the representation, there is absolutely nothing known or conceivable for us.' But, as he then mentions, and several others agree, it's hard to see how the argument from the principle of sufficient reason supports this contention.

Exactly right, I completely mangled it. :yikes:

Thanks for that very painstaking response to my question about 'akrasia'. Again, my inner voice can only say - 'do more reading'. :sad:

The soul itself is the fundamental principle of actuality of the living body. But I ask now, how can that fundamental actuality (what we're calling the will here) direct itself as to which potentials to actualize, to create activity? Acting as a force, from within a body, with some sort of choice as to which parts of the body it acts on and when, means that it must be itself, not behaving according to the law of inertia. This is why we can understand the soul, or the will, as immaterial, it is a cause which does not act according to the laws which apply to material bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have just viewed an interview with the philosopher Richard Swinburne about this very point. See here.

...the problem of "being overcome by pleasure"... — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't this something to do with the parable of the three horses, being the various appetites? That the appetitive part of the soul overwhelms the rational part? Would seem like 'plato 101' to me, but then what do I know....

As soon as you get into the actual physics, then it's really better suited to Physics Forum. The question is not one about physics, it's one about meaning.

:up:

__

I wonder if the following rings a bell?

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (4 February [O.S. 23 January] 1889 – 10 February 1968) was a Russian American sociologist and political activist, who contributed to the social cycle theory.

Sensate (Materialistic) Culture

Sensate/Materialist culture has these features:

The defining cultural principle is that true reality is sensory – only the material world is real. There is no other reality or source of values. This becomes the organizing principle of society. It permeates every aspect of culture and defines the basic mentality. People are unable to think in any other terms.
Sensate culture pursues science and technology, but dedicates little creative thought to spirituality or religion.

Dominant values are wealth, health, bodily comfort, sensual pleasures, power and fame.
Ethics, politics, and economics are utilitarian and hedonistic. All ethical and legal precepts are considered mere man-made conventions, relative and changeable.

Art and entertainment emphasize sensory stimulation. In the decadent stages of Sensate culture there is a frenzied emphasis on the new and the shocking (literally, sensationalism).

Religious institutions are mere relics of previous epochs, stripped of their original substance, and tending to fundamentalism and exaggerated fideism (the view that faith is not compatible with reason). — The Visionary Theories of Pitirim Sorokin

I really mean to get at, that in our daily lives, there seems to be lack of "meaningfulness in the mundane", whereby the meaningful informs the mundane — schopenhauer1

During my hiatus from the forum last year I discovered John Vervaeke, a Canadian lecturer in cognitive science and psychology, who's channel is called 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.' This is precisely what he's talking about. You can find an introduction here.

...the very connection of one's actions with the cosmos.... — schopenhauer1

This has always been the focus of my interest in philosophy, although it's certainly not the focus of academic philosophy.

Wasn't the "Protestant work ethic" an effort to make the mundane meaningful? — BC

I think not. It was specifically Protestant in having been shaped by Calvinism in particular, with its emphasis on 'the elect' and the impossibility of knowing whether you were among the saved. 'Protestants, beginning with Martin Luther, conceptualized worldly work as a duty which benefits both the individual and society as a whole. Thus, the Catholic idea of good works was transformed into an obligation to consistently work diligently as a sign of grace. Whereas Catholicism teaches that good works are required of Catholics as a necessary manifestation of the faith they received, and that faith apart from works is dead and barren, the Calvinist theologians taught that only those who were predestined to be saved would be saved.' This was just as much a source of a kind of deep existential anxiety as it was of meaning.

Western secularity, including its capitalist economy, originated as the result of an unlikely concatenation of circumstances. To survive within the Roman Empire, early Christianity had to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, and keep a low profile that did not challenge the state; spiritual concerns were necessarily distinguished from political issues. Later struggles between the Emperor and the Papacy tended to reinforce that distinction. By making private and regular confession compulsory, the late medieval Church also promoted the development of a subjective interiority that encouraged more personal religiosity. New technologies such as the printing press made widespread literacy and hence more individualistic religion possible.

All that made the Reformation possible. By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians and a more transcendent God, Luther’s emphasis on salvation-by-faith-alone eliminated the intricate web of mediation – priests, sacraments, canon law, pilgrimages, public penances, etc. – that in effect had constituted the sacred dimension of this world. The religiously-saturated medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural was sundered by internalizing faith and projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world.

The newly-liberated space between them generated something new: the secular (from the Latin saeculum, “generation, age,” thus the temporal world of birth and death). The inner freedom of conscience was distinguished from our outer bondage to secular authorities. “These realms, which contained respectively religion and the world, were hermetically sealed from each other as though constituting separate universes” (Nelson 1981, 74-75). The sharp distinction between them was a radical break with the past, and it led to a new kind of person. The medieval understanding of our life as a cycle of sin and repentance was replaced by the more disciplined character-structure required in the modern world, sustained by a more internalized conscience that did not accept the need for external mediation or the validation of priests.

As God slowly disappeared above the clouds, the secular became increasingly dynamic, accelerating into the creative destruction that today we must keep readjusting to. What we tend to forget in the process is that the distinction between sacred and secular was originally a religious distinction, devised to empower a new type of Protestant spirituality. — David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole

All of this has the effect of 'subjectivising' or 'privatizing' the notion of meaning, so that it becomes an attribute of the individual's search for truth, in an otherwise mechanical and inherently meaningless universe knowledge of which is mediated solely by science.

We can only hope.

Nevertheless, let's not fall into the woke hysteria of judging every historical character against the standards of modern liberalism.

He’s not entirely off the hook, his attitude towards and treatment of animals was far from exemplary, but wanton torture, it wasn’t.

started the my-hero-is-a-jerk trend (vide his thread on Descartes & Animal Cruelty) on this forum. — Agent Smith

As an aside, I found during the course of that thread that Descartes likely DID NOT commit the terrible acts of cruelty that had been ascribed to him on various Internet sites, but that these acts MIGHT have been carried out by students at a notorious French college purportedly influenced by Cartesian ideas about animals as automatons.

am kind of sympathetic to Schopenhauer's take — schopenhauer1

Indeed! as am I, clearly.

What makes you think it's heading in a good direction? — schopenhauer1

I meant I thought you were heading in a good direction in respect of this OP.

Religion, while perhaps no longer a productive avenue for speculation, at least offered a framework for considering the world in a more imaginative way — schopenhauer1

'Religion' is not and has never been a monolithic entity, a single thing. When it's used in this context, it denotes the Enlightenment schema of philosophy, religion and science, each with their own magisteria, and with religion the waning voice of premodernity. But in pre-modern and archaic times there was no separately-defined sphere known as 'religion' - it was simply 'the law' which encompassed every aspect of life, governing social relations, the rythm of the days, months and years, and providing the cosmic backdrop against which the affairs of humans played out. But within these vast and ancient cultural lifeforms, there are still encoded many of the dramas and mysteries of the psyche, and of birth life and death. Think the Greek Myths and the Bhagavad Gita and other epics.

The second thing is, what is often called 'speculative metaphysics' was birthed out of the visionary experiences of prophets, sages, shamans and seers. These often shattering and epoch-making visionary episodes were then conveyed, often aurally, for millenia, to become crystalised in the 'axial age' where they began to be preserved in writing. What we see now as 'religions' are almost lke the fossilised remnants of those ancient codexes, although still with a pulse.

The reason i make that point is because speculative metaphysics is (or at least might be) informed by an insight or intuition into the nature of being - not simply a 'I wonder if there's a teapot in orbit between Mars and Venus.'

I think the very oldest strata of what was to become Greek philosophy contains, or maybe conceals, the remnants of such visionary states. (Here's a review of maverick scholar Peter Kingsley's exegesis of what he sees as the mystical visionary Pythagoras. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think it's a perspective to be aware of.)

So - I sense what you sense is lacking, and I think it's heading in a good direction, but I thnk it will involve a long journey.

Yes - is 'the domain of natural numbers' a meaningful term?

One of the ideas I've picked up on this forum is Wittgenstein's 'meaning is use' - that you see what a word really means in the way it is used, not it's supposed dictionary definition.

As for focussing, I'm very much like you, I tend to think about big ideas and topics while often falling short in detailed knowledge of specifics. Careful scholars are generally much more circumspect and will focus on an area of speciality. It's practically unavoidable nowadays, with such vast amounts of information at your fingertips. Nevertheless, I try and maintain an approach which is thematic and synoptic. It suits this kind of subject particularly well.

Regarding Spinoza, check out this title. Oh, and another current author in the area of comparative religion and philosophical spirituality that you ought to know if you don't already is Mark Vernon.

I am interested more in how such definitions and concepts inform the understanding of consciousness on a philosophical level. What do you think about the various concepts in the understanding of consciousness? Which of these concepts are more helpful or unhelpful in the twentieth first century climate of philosophical thought, especially in relation to the mind-body problem? — Jack Cummins

They're deep and difficult topics. To discuss them requires awareness of the cultural and historical context within which they evolved and how they were used in that context, in other words, a hermeneutic approach. A major part of that involves understanding modern thought since the European Enlightenment. One difficulty is, most people are involved in that without reflective awareness of it. They defend positions that they don't understand themselves.

Comparative religion is a particularly useful discipline in this context as it is very much concerned with understanding what is now called the 'history of ideas' - an interdisciplinary subject in the humanities which can be located between philosophy and history, not only about reality as viewed through the perspective of concepts and theories, but also viewed from the perspective of mythology, religion and traditional culture. Joseph Campbell's books on comparative mythology are a well-known example. There's an enormous amount of material that could be included under that heading, but looking at it in terms of the origin and historical development of major cultural forms provides a useful analytic framework.

I'd conclude by mentioning hermenuetics again - one of its aims and methods is re-interpreting mythological or historical ideas in the context of modern culture. Mankind has outgrown its childhood myths but many of the underlying themes re-surface in different forms in our day (as can be seen time and again in the flood of special-effects blockbusters appearing in cinemas all over the world.) Again that is where careful interpretation is required.

So to invoke such broad terms as mind, body, spirit, soul, needs awareness of the context from which they've been derived and also the way that they're being used. Not an easy thing to do, but possible, and worthwhile.

Coming to think of it, here's a legitimate question within your area of expertise: there is a 'domain of natural numbers', is there not?

And there are numbers outside that domain, like the imaginary number $\sqrt -1$ which is used in renormalisation procedures in physics.

Can philosophy bring any clarity to something that exists only within its practice? — jgill

Have you ever happened across Wigner's essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences? It's atrocious prose, but I found the gist of it compelling when first introduced to it via the previous Forum.

Also Mario Livio Why Maths Works, and Jim Franklin The Mathematical World. (The latter explicitly addresses the question of what maths is about.)

...being a Mysterian myself, I can't help but like him.... — Manuel

"although I can't say exactly why" :lol:

I wonder what would happen if this were posted on a math forum. — jgill

I would never visit a math forum. My school maths was terrible. My interest in the philosophy of math came later in life. I have enough interest in and knowledge of physics to visit physics forum very occasionally.

I think it's muddled. But then I was never impressed by 'mysterianism' either.

I am very mindful of some parallels with Buddhist philosophy in this regard. One of the attributes of the Buddha is described in the Sanskrit term, yathābhūtaṃ, generally translated as 'to see things as they truly are' (dictionary entry.) The principle is the Buddha sees things clearly because his cognition is unclouded by ignorance (clinging, hatred, passion.) But the point I wanted to make in particular is that Buddhas doesn't posit 'another world'. Rather, seeing 'this realm' for what it is, is itself liberation (although paradoxically from the perspective of the ordinary person there is indeed a higher truth and a path by which to seek it.)

In contrast, it is often said that Platonism posits a higher, real world and deprecates what we nowadays take to be the real world i.e. the sensory domain. (But then, it shouldn't be forgotten that the original Platonic Academy included a very rounded curriculum with a lot of emphasis on athletics and physical training.)

All that aside, I, for one, fully accept that there is a such a thing as the 'philosophical ascent', although whether I personally will ever succeed in getting to the first base is well and truly moot.

:up:

false judgement is shown to be impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

There's another thing which this brings to mind. It occurs with respect to 'akrasia', a term used by Socrates to describe the state of acting against one's better judgement, or weakness of will. It refers to a lack of self-control or discipline, where an individual acts on their desires or emotions rather than following their rational beliefs. Akrasia is often considered a form of moral failing or lack of virtue. Famously, in Protagoras, Socrates attests that akrasia does not exist, claiming "No one goes willingly toward the bad" (358d). If a person examines a situation and decides to act in the way he determines to be best, he will pursue this action, as the best course is also the good course, i.e. man's natural goal.

I think this has clear parallels with the argument about 'false judgement'. Just as real knowledge is only possible with respect to what truly is, Socrates denies that it is possible to act against your better judgement. Of course, Socrates' account is often questioned or even rejected, because we all know that humans do, in fact, have moments of 'akrasia' (sure as hell I do, and lots of 'em). And Aristotle considerably modifies it (and makes it far more realistic) in the Nichomachean ethics. But what I'm trying to get at is the resonance between the impossibility of having knowledge of what is not truly existent, with the impossibility of acting against one's better judgement. Both of these ideas strike us today, I think, as highly implausible, as I'm sure we would normally say that judgements can be mistaken and actions conflict with our better judgement. But I think both these ideas, which perhaps are two different facets of the one overall principle, says something about the character and attributes of Plato's Socrates.

We have had a few actual physicists active here, but they seem to have at least momentarily fled the environment. — jgill

I've posted maybe a dozen times on Physics Forum, which is a fantastically well-run and professional forum, but they give very short shrift to anything deemed 'too philosophical' which covers a very wide range of topics. I posted a question about philosophy of maths and the ontological status of number, which was frozen because, the moderator said, there was no-one there qualified to address it.

And they do!

I know, right? And it’s what Trump thinks he really looks like….

Wish to hell the federal indictments would drop. This interminable 'is he or isn't he/will they or won't they?' is intolerable.

I'll add that of all the weird and irrational s***t that Trump gets up to, the trump card, pardon the pun, was his NFT collection from a couple of months back. The idea that someone who pretends to be a contender for the highest office would instigate such a scheme is just beyond ridiculous.

You may be interested to note that Philip Goff registered and entered one post in response to my criticism of one of his articles about six years back.

"So, do we have an adequate grasp of the fact—even if we should consider it in many ways—that what is entirely, is entirely knowable; and what in no way is, is in every way unknowable?" (477a) — Fooloso4

This is clearly derived from or descended from Parmenides, is it not?

A footnote:

The good, being beyond being, is not something that is entirely. — Fooloso4

The way I parse this in the modern lexicon is to use the expression 'beyond existence' rather than 'beyond being'. 'Existence' is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent with respect to, whereas 'being' may denote 'domains of being' beyond what we understand as 'existence'.

:chin:

There are degrees. Normality is not 'insane' by definition, but there's a range. I mean, there's been discussion of the fact that sociopaths and psychopaths often succeed in climbing the corporate ladder due to their ruthlessness. There are widespread kinds of mental health issues amongst the populace, and anxiety, depression and drug dependency are widespread. Many of those subjects are not insane by any stretch but they're also not optimally adjusted.

I wrote a blog post once on the 'bell curve of normality' - on the left, those with severe mental health or personality disorders, then the middle of the bell curve, where most people are (it being a bell curve!) but then on the extreme right the really high-functioning types who are as far above the norm as the left side is beneath it. That can be mapped against Maslow's 'heirarchy of needs', meaning that on the right, there's your highly self-actualised individuals. Very difficult to judge who that might be, of course.

But I'm struggling to think of where you would look for the criteria to make this judgement. As Freud says, his yardstick for sanity was really just the ability to live, work, and maintain relationships. But I think that philosophy looks for something rather deeper than that.

By the standards of the enlightened, everyone is indeed a bit mad. (According to Buddhist scholar William S. Waldron there is a Pali aphorism 'Sabbe sattā ummattaka' meaning 'all sentient beings are deranged', although the canonicity of that phrase has been disputed (source.)) Indeed in many pre-modern traditions, the normal human condition is seen as one of inherent delusion or confusion. I think that's the meaning of avidya or ignorance in Eastern religions. In Christianity, however, this has come down as the 'original sin', making it a volitional rather than a cognitive defect, and so far less tractable to a strictly philosophical analysis. But there's still an overlap there.

In any case, one of the basic features of the modern liberal political system is to make the world a safe place in which to remain ignorant. Cynical, I know, but there you have it. On the upside, at least in the free West you're allowed to make such criticisms of the culture you're in.

What makes that form of realism Platonic? — Mww

Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, so do numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planets are made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned and these objects’ perfectly objective properties, so are statements about numbers and sets. Mathematical truths are therefore discovered, not invented. ....

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. — SEP

In his seminal 1973 paper, “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf presented a problem facing all accounts of mathematical truth and knowledge. Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible. Thus, the philosopher of mathematics faces a dilemma: either abandon standard readings of mathematical claims or give up our best epistemic theories. Neither option is attractive. ....

Mathematical objects are in many ways unlike ordinary physical objects such as trees and cars. We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses. It is not obvious that we learn about mathematical objects this way. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could use our senses to learn about mathematical objects. We do not see integers, or hold sets. Even geometric figures are not the kinds of things that we can sense. ...

[Rationalists] claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies. — IEP, Indispensability Argument in Phil. of Math

Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered—a position known as Platonism. It takes its name from the ancient Greek thinker Plato, who imagined that mathematical truths inhabit a world of their own—not a physical world, but rather a non-physical realm of unchanging perfection; a realm that exists outside of space and time. Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist. In The Emperor’s New Mind, he wrote that there appears “to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth—a truth which has a reality of its own...” ....

Other scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, “has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science.” The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he’ll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all? — What is Math

Can you see the issue lurking behind these controversies? It is that naturalism/empiricism - 'our best epistemic theories' - don't seem to provide for the kind of innate capacity that mathematical knowledge seems to imply. And this is the tip of a very large iceberg - which is, tacitly, that mathematics and reason are incompatible with naturalist epistemology.

didn't have to look!

Looking at 74b, we can see the inkling of something new and different just beggin’ to be exposed. Socrates says stuff like…when we think……but leaves it at that. Kant steps in with a new notion of what is actually happening when we think, and the transcendental arguments are the necessary conditions that justify those speculative notions. It’s Aristotle’s logic in spades: if this is the case, which the LNC says it is, and that follows necessarily from this case, which the Law of Identity says it does, then the entire systemic procedure is only possible if this certain something is antecedent to all of it.

By delving deeper into the human cognitive system, examining it from a transcendental point of view, claimed to be the only way to determine that antecedent something, Kant both sustains and refutes arguments from imperfection. Refutes insofar as purely logical systems can be perfectly formed and thereby perfectly concluded, hence can be absolutely certain in themselves; sustained insofar as being metaphysical, there are no possible empirical proofs for those transcendental points of view, which a proper science must have, hence is imperfect. — Mww

:up: I will only add that I think this is where the synthetic a priori is of great significance. Even if, as you say, the purely a priori gives no meaningful empirical information, through the act of synthesis - through the combination of a priori principles with empirical observation - much new ground has been discovered, possibly including the vast majority of modern physics. I think this what is behind Eugene Wigner's well-known essay on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Whence the strange concordance between the operations of mathematical reason and the order of things? All of this goes back to these dialogues.

****

I will step back a bit and say something about what interests me about this topic. I came to philosophy forums ten years ago with the conviction that Platonic realism was in some sense true. By that, I simply meant that the natural numbers and such things as laws and principles, are real ('discovered not invented'). The mainstream consensus seems very much the opposite - various forms of conventionalism, fictionalism and so on ('invented not discovered'). The arguments become extremely technical and really only understandable to specialists but the broad drift is that empiricist philosophy generally reject the notion of innate ideas.

I've been researching this particular question through various perspectives. The theme that is beginning to emerge is that this all goes back to the medieval contests between nominalism and metaphysical realism.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence. — Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences

So in my case, I've started to go back and try and understand the origins of this debate, which in my view begins with Parmenides but my knowledge is, and probably will always be, very sketchy.

In Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) mind (manas) is one of the six sense-gates - eye and visible objects, ear and sound, nose and odor, tongue and taste, body and touch, mind and mental objects. But let's not take the thread further in that direction as Buddhist psychology is a vast subject in its own right.

My problem, everyone's except for a few perhaps, is that the only conduit for perception (both of ourselves and the world out there) is our senses (the 5 physical and the sixth, mind) and there's no reason at all why they should be truthful or untruthful. — Agent Smith

But as I said, humans are self-aware beings. We can make decisions, decide on courses of action, plan to get or to avoid, and so all - all manner of things. Doing that, we constantly make judgements about what matters, what can be ignored, what must be acquired, and so on. That happens from from the autonomic level up to the conscious level, constantly. Sensory perception is only one element in this, the other being intellection or rational judgement (not to mention impulse, desire, emotion....) So what you're talking about is not something simple.

I (see) no necessity that our senses be either truthful or mendacious — Agent Smith

It's a truism that appearances can deceive. And I think that's because judgement is involved. Even in animal perception, appearances can be deliberately used to deceive, as in the myriad cases of camoflage by predators or prey. On the other hand, the senses can also be extraordinarily accurate - barn owls can hear a mouse moving a kilometer away or see by the light of a single candle the same distance. But only humans are required to make judgements about truth in the abstract, to reflect on the meaning of their experiences, about what experience means.

I've often discussed the two truths doctrine. It's greeted with scepticism from naturalists, because it claims there's a higher truth (paramathasatya). That scepticism is because, I believe, modern thought doesn't have a category for 'the unconditioned' (except for perhaps in formal logic). I think it's a major deficiency. I suppose that is because in Western culture, 'the unconditioned' is nearly always associated with God, which puts it out-of-bounds for naturalist or secular philosophy. But that is a very big question.

(This made me think again about the role of revealed truth in Buddhism. Many would say that Buddhism rejects the idea of revealed truth, but really the Buddha's enlightenment is said to reveal the truth of the cause of suffering and its end. In that sense Buddhism is not so vastly removed from other religions.)

In any case, Buddhism and Schopenhauer both diagnose human ills as originating in a mistaken judgement about the nature of existence (or experience, which amounts to the same). They both, in different ways, say that humans attribute reality to things that have no genuine or real being, so we're attached to an illusory realm which inevitably dissappoints us because it doesn't bring us the joy we thought we could get from it. Schopenhauer and Buddhism are both described as 'pessimistic' on those grounds, but that fails to see that there can be freedom from that condition.

Of course it’s much easier said than done.

What can't you afford, exactly? Being calm and measured? That would certainly map well against your output.

Sage advice from the Buddha: watch your breath. Don’t pursue chains of thought, or allow yourself to be seized by emotion. Know that everything is transient. Carry on.

I encourage any Q-physicist reading this post to consider enrolling in this course — jgill

If you mean this https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/reality-being-and-existence-an-introduction-to-metaphysics-online - I've had that course bookmarked a long while but have never found the time to enroll. But I agree, I think it looks a worthwhile undertaking.

There is for Aristotle no "equal itself" existing by itself timeless and unchanging. — Fooloso4

I’m very aware the ‘problem of reification’ when this discussion comes up. I know that Aristotle is said to have ‘immanetized the Forms’ but I don’t believe that by so doing he denied their reality. But I will do some more reading on it. I think I will also create a new thread on Gerson's essay Platonism vs Naturalism, for which there is a video of his reading of it.

FIrst rate. I have encountered the Comford book before and will re-visit it. (I love the image of the tethered goat although of course Jurassic Park comes to mind which is wildly anachronistic.) But much to chew over there, I will return to those points.

I'm posting irregularly at the moment due to work commitments. Appreciate the feedback