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Messages - sciborg2

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916
Philosophy & Science / Re: The works and ideas of Krishnamurti
« on: March 05, 2014, 08:10:41 pm »
You should check out the trialogues with Sheldrake, Mckenna and Abraham. Those will make you dizzy :D

I've been meaning to get to those. I've finished only the first hour of the dialogue I linked above.

It's all great stuff but I'm not one to usually sit and just listen to someone talk. Part of the issue is if I do anything else I often get distracted and have to rewind.

I have a soft spot for Sheldrake. The determination he has at least is worthy of respect. And the data isn't wholly against him from what I understand, at least not yet since not enough studies have been conducted.

917
The Forum of Interesting Things / Lucid Dreaming
« on: March 05, 2014, 07:44:00 pm »
Can you do it?

I can barely remember my dreams, even after keeping a dream journal. Just curious to see how others manage.

918
To be fair, he could've been referring to himself as 'we' the way that Inchoroi in TWP did.

But to be honest, of all the mysteries in TD, the one about whether Aurdrey was abused or saw something or whatever I find the least interesting... Of course it's terrible for someone to be abused or exposed to those crimes, but from a narrative PoV who gives a shit?

Yeah, I feel like this has become something of a bizarre side-plot. Where I think it matters is that the cult is just too large to do anything about. It's not 10 or even 50 people, it's a huge chunk of the population in that area.

So I think Marty and Rust are going to take down Tuttles and Childresses, but there will be more families waiting in the wings to keep the tradition alive.

919
Philosophy & Science / Re: The "Intellectual Bitterness" Thread
« on: March 04, 2014, 10:17:31 pm »
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we have gone way off topic by now (we are discussing two systems of believe now [and before that about subjective truth and objective truth]...and not "intellectual bitterness" anymore ;) ) and last but not least...i am not sure i could continue this discussion without stepping on anyones toes

I think it's relevant in that bitterness seems to come from people disagreeing with supposedly correct answers intelligent people hold. But at times this frustration might be the fault of the presumably self-identified intelligensia.

But I do agree that it leads off into questions of epistemology.

I do think we can argue for plausibility and improbability while accepting definite knowing is outside our grasp. Climate change seems like one example where we can be confident in our assertion that something should be done.


920
Philosophy & Science / Re: Interesting Thoughts on Human Perception
« on: March 03, 2014, 07:18:48 pm »
Lehar has a free book up on epistemology called Boundaries.

Having Have not gotten far as I just started reading it over the weekend but so far I like it. Feels clearer than many texts I've encountered.

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The boundaries of our knowledge pertain not only to the universe’s spatial extent, but also to its essence. What is space, or time, or space-time? Or, as philosophers like to phrase it, what is the ontology (is-ness, ultimate nature) of space-time?

Ontology is one of those comforting words that we use to paste over ultimate mysteries to shield us from their frightening glare. What kind of explanation could possibly be satisfactory to account for the ultimate nature of space and time? And a similar ontological quandary hangs over the ultimate nature of matter, and energy. In physics we describe these things with mathematical equations and formulae that predict how matter and energy behave. But matter and energy are more than just equations, they have material existence, and extendedness in space and time, something that an equation does not have. As for time, astronomers assure us that it has a finite beginning at the moment of the big bang, which they assure us, has been reconstructed to the minutest fraction of a second after its spontaneous coming into existence. But as to what, if anything, occurred before the big bang, or whether it is even meaningful to think of anything occurring then, or what the ultimate fate of the universe might be at the other end of the time line, these too are mysteries too great to be grasped in any meaningful way, so we label them neatly and file them for future reference.

921
Quote
Einstein thought the existence of black holes in his models was a flaw that would later be corrected - and then we found them.  It's fairly preposterous that these axiomatic abstractions should reveal anything about the world.

Yeah, I asked my old discrete math professor if he thought math was created or discovered. He mentioned the paper you linked - thanks for that as I'd never actually read it.  :-[

The effectiveness of digressions in the field becoming applicable is uncanny IMO. Beyond that I don't know what to make of it.

922
http://philpapers.org/archive/PIGNAA.pdf

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...As I said, Harris wants to deliver moral decision making to science because
he wants to defeat the evil (if oddly paired) twins of religious fanaticism and leftist
moral relativism. Despite the fact that I think he grossly overestimates the pervasiveness of the latter, we are together on this. Except of course that the best
arguments against both positions are philosophical, not scientific. The most convincing reason why gods cannot possibly have anything to do with morality was
presented 24 centuries ago by Plato, in the already mentioned (in the context of Dawkins’s book) Euthyphro dialogue, and which goes, predictably, entirely unmentioned in The Moral Landscape.

Needless to say, moral relativism, too, has been the focus of sustained and devastating attack in philosophy, for instance by thinkers such as Peter Singer and Simon Blackburn, and this is all to be found in the large ethical and metaethical literature that Harris finds so increases the degree of boredom in the universe.

Harris’s chief claim throughout the book is that moral judgments are a kind
of fact, and that as such they are amenable to scientific inquiry. First of all, the
second statement does not at all follow from the first. Surely we can agree that the
properties of triangles in Euclidean geometry are “facts,” in the sense that nobody
who understands Euclidean geometry can opine that the sum of the angles in a
triangle is not 180° and get away with it. But we do not use science, or any kind of
empirical evidence at all, to arrive at agreement about such facts. At the very least,
and without wanting to push an argument for moral realism, this makes the point
that “facts” is too heterogeneous a category, and that Harris needs to be much
more careful on how to handle it...

I think this is a pretty well intentioned yet deservedly hard critique from Massimo, himself an - IMO - honest skeptic. I'd often felt that Harris was incredibly lazy when it came to philosophy but my opinion was that of a layperson dipping their toes into the pool.

It's good to see I wasn't the only one.  ;D

Beyond that, I do wonder about the education of some supposed skeptics. There seems to be a subset (unclear how large) that is enamored by the Singularity and it's supposed virtual Promised Land, and that this group isn't necessarily educated on the continuing developments of science nor the various issues brought up by philosophy discussed in the Intellectual Bitterness thread. Massimo shares this concern:

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I would actually go so far as to charge many of the leaders of the New Atheism movement (and, by implication, a good number of their followers) with anti-intellectualism, one mark of which is a lack of respect for the proper significance, value, and methods of another field of intellectual endeavor.

A clear cut example of this is the glorious mess that is Rational Wiki, wherein Searle is accused of racism because he doesn't think computers can be conscious entities.  :-\

923
Philosophy & Science / Re: The "Intellectual Bitterness" Thread
« on: March 01, 2014, 03:50:08 pm »
No worries, it was good stuff Royce. I think being at peace with yourself and the world isn't necessarily just a first world privilege, for all but the most extreme cases it becomes a question of possibly deep importance. Krishnamurti talks about this in the dialogue I linked in his thread - can people escape conditioning?

You mention philosophy seeming like another language - I actually wonder if everyone is capable of dealing with the kind of discussions we have. And on the flip side, what if our cognitive faculties are actually limited? Maybe our qualia are duller, for example.  :'(

I also wonder if discussion becomes an addiction and leads to people just complaining about the world around them in a snake-eating-tail situation...which leads us to what knowledge is worth evangelizing? Or is it more action that matters, as the spreading of supposedly important knowledge might simply be a selfish excuse to exercise and exorcise our bitterness?

(I guess knowledge relating to doing should be separated from simply evangelizing of paradigms here.)

Especially if our supposed knowledge is only a series of "bets", as Robert Anton Wilson says in Creative Agnosticism:
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...When I speak of The “Real” Universe being created by self-hypnosis, I do not intend anything else but psychological literalness. In the hypnotized state, the existential “reality” around us is edited out and we go away to a kind of “Real” Universe created by the hypnotist. The reason that it is usually easy to induce hypnosis in humans is that we have a kind of “consciousness” that easily drifts away into such “Real” Universes rather than deal with existential muddle and doubt. Everybody tends to drift away in that fashion several times in an ordinary conversation, editing sound out at the ear like Bruner’s cat. As Colin Wilson points out, when we look at our watch, forget the time, and have to look again, it is because we have drifted off into a “Real” Universe again. We visit them all the time, but especially when existential concerns are painful or stressful.

Every “Real” Universe is easy to understand, because it is much simpler than the existential continuum. Theists, Nazis, Flat Earthers, etc. can explain their “Real” Universes as quickly as any Fundamentalist Materialist explains his, because of this simplicity of the edited object as contrasted with the complexity of the sensory-sensual continuum in which we live when awake (unhypnotized).

Being hypnotized by a “Real” Universe, we become more and more detached from the existential continuum, and are annoyed when it interferes with us...


I wanted to pop in and mention that IIRC there is an entire tradition of Greek skeptics so the Trilemma does not make any appeal to authority, rather it's the philosophical position that is being referred to.

Delvagus actually did a whole thing about this kind of skepticism on Bakker's blog, will try to hunt it down.

924
More on Mathematical Platonism from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

For the interested reader. Have not gone through it myself. May post some tidbits that interested me when I do.

925
Philosophy & Science / Re: The "Intellectual Bitterness" Thread
« on: February 28, 2014, 07:59:48 pm »
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Also, and i'm repeating myself again, nothing stands on empty air. You have to have an origin to start from. So trying to come out of thin air only works for religions ;)

But ultimately it's conviction in God or Hume's "moral sentiments", or conviction with regard to reason?

I feel confident assuming mathematical truths following from the axioms, but does this even require bivalent logic? (I'm not challenging, I honestly don't know!  ???)

Outside of math...things get even more murky it would seem. Searle went through a bunch of philosophical questions here.

We start by assuming Solipsism is false as a matter of practicality....but then after that....is there a good way to distinguish between Idealism and Materialism?

eta: All to say I think a great deal of the "bitterness" stems from the demand people accept certain ideas over other ideas. But I think Dragharrow makes a good case that we should just chill, at least to an extent, because so much of what we know rests on assumptions.

926
The Forum of Interesting Things / Money & Life
« on: February 27, 2014, 11:15:15 pm »
Gonna Watch This Tonight.

(Obviously we can go beyond the film, but seemed like a good opener)

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MONEY & LIFE is a passionate and inspirational essay-style documentary that that asks a provocative question: can we see the economic crisis not as a disaster, but as a tremendous opportunity?  This cinematic odyssey connects the dots on our current economic pains and offers a new story of money based on an emerging paradigm of planetary well-being that understands all of life as profoundly interconnected.

The film takes us on a journey, from the origins of money to connecting the systemic dots on the current global financial crisis and how we got here. Most importantly, MONEY & LIFE says that we owe it to ourselves to understand the fundamentals of this technology called money in order to be effective participants in the economic transformation that is happening around us, a shift more rapid and as profound as the Industrial Revolution....

927
Julian Barbour on Does Time Exist?

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Julian Barbour, visiting professor at the University of Oxford and the author of The End of Time, addresses the question, Does Time Exist? Barbour explores the history of scientific thought on the concept of time and presents his own interpretations of what time is.

928
I don't really understand the concept of the 4th wall.  Can anyone help? 

Was it the final shot?

Well on my part I was talking about the article you linked, about how Cohle could be talking to audience making his fictional world relive the same events through a rewatch.

929
Philosophy & Science / Re: The "Intellectual Bitterness" Thread
« on: February 23, 2014, 08:24:47 pm »
Heh, maybe it's time for some Alan Watts

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But the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very funny game, for what they wanted to say was this: all you people who believe in religion--old ladies and wishful thinkers-- you've got a big daddy up there, and you want comfort, but life is rough. Life is tough, as success goes to the most hard- headed people. That was a very convenient theory when the European and American worlds were colonizing the natives everywhere else. They said 'We're the end product of evolution, and we're tough. I'm a big strong guy because I face facts, and life is just a bunch of junk, and I'm going to impose my will on it and turn it into something else. I'm real hard.' That's a way of flattering yourself.

And so, it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world works. In academic circles, no other theory of the world than the fully automatic model is respectable. Because if you're an academic person, you've got to be an intellectually tough person, you've got to be prickly.

930
Philosophy & Science / Re: The works and ideas of Krishnamurti
« on: February 23, 2014, 08:14:55 pm »
J. Krishnamurti, David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake and John Hidley: The Nature of the Mind [4 hrs ]

Sheldrake looks so young!

Just starting on this, so far so good...

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