(December 16, 2016 at 1:31 am)Aroura Wrote: I love Qualiasoup, he explains things so clearly.
The entire video is relevant. Videos like this should be required watching for all middle school aged kids and up, honestly.

It's only relevant if the narrator addresses the obvious fact that the burden of proof sometimes includes deductive arguments that lack empirical verification and must be granted as either logically following from self-evident truths or assumed for the sake of pragmatism. Does the video concede that much?

@mud. I've just spent the last five or so hours reading the first of your recommendations, Plato's Phaedo, and all I can say is wow. It was incredibly moving... to be reading a full account of Socrate's last discussions/debates with his friends on the subject of life and death, the soul and the afterlife, before willfully, fearlessly, and ahead of time carrying out his own death sentence by drinking the poison. That's a man to be admired... I hope to be as composed and willing to go as him when I'm on my deathbed. It was just an incredible read... philosophy-wise I admit I was expecting something dry and boring, a real chore to read full of technical terms but it was so not that. He presented his case for the immortality of the soul beautifully and clearly, and answering all objections in a Buddha-like fashion where only truth and clarity matters, and admitting of any of his own doubts. No posturing of any kind, just a purely equal, honest, and rational debate. If only all debates could be like that. I'm just utterly awe-inspired by the man. As to his argument, it was just so strong, and just so well presented/argued in terms of logic, proofs, examples, metaphors etc. Just the whole method of argument and counter argument inspires confidence in philosophy itself as a means to truth if not his particular conclusions. But I have to say in a time when nothing was known about the brain, I think his argument and the foundations for it were incredibly insightful. And tbh imo it has shades of Buddhism in his ideas, not only of a pure 'soul' shackled and confused by the senses, but also in the sense of a kind of cyclical view of nature of death and rebirth, with the equivalent of reincarnation of tainted souls into like creatures - angry people into wolves etc - but with pure souls - those who have lived temperate, philosophical lives in pursuit of absolute truth (rather than the confused, sensory truth) - being the elect that get to heaven... roughly equivalent to arahants in Buddhism... those who have become enlightened no longer partake in the cycle of life and death because they no longer crave becoming in any form. I mean, I know it's not Buddhism but I do see parallels. And also it had shades (possibly) of Chadwootian thinking ... causes, essences, and absolutes... stuff that simultaneously baffles and intrigues me whenever he talks about it... and which Socrates explains very clearly, and with even more clarity yet to come if I read more of his writings... which I now fully expect to do because it's clearly not going to be the chore I thought it was But anyway, to be clear, I don't believe in souls or reincarnation or anything of that ilk, and this is not enough to convince me, but it was a good argument nonetheless, for its time. I found that some of his friends raised similar objections to ones I would have raised, which was good... felt like I was almost there and nice to see them answered... but if I was there with the benefit of current knowledge, I would have had a lot of objections on psychological/neuroscience grounds as well Anyway, thanks for the reading list, I'm now really looking forward to getting into this stuff for real... it's a lot more accessible than I was expecting it to be

@Em

That's awesome! I won't lie, the Phaedo's ending almost (ALMOST!) moved me to tears the second time I read it!
Check out Euthyphro, Apology, and Meno too! They're among the more "essential" dialogues.
Once you move on from Plato, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is great. And Epicurus' letters are pretty good too. Those are just a few suggestions to start scratching the surface, and include what you would likely cover if you took an ancient philosophy course in college.

(December 15, 2016 at 10:32 am)Mudhammam Wrote:

(December 14, 2016 at 9:29 pm)Chas Wrote: I have made no claim other than requiring evidence, your word salad notwithstanding.

If you need the poster to dumb down their statements so that you can follow, perhaps you're in the wrong thread.

Or you could learn to express yourself clearly.

Quote:

(December 14, 2016 at 9:29 pm)Chas Wrote: Value judgments are subjective by definition.

That might be true in one sense, but that's not the sense I mean. There can be objective facts about subjective states.  "To discover truth is better than to believe in lies" is a value judgment that only matters because in most situations it is objectively true.

It is true in all senses - it is definitional.

(December 16, 2016 at 11:12 am)Chas Wrote: Or you could learn to express yourself clearly.

And yet, this thread has got on just fine without your participation. Strange, isn't it? So, nah, it's just you.

(December 16, 2016 at 11:12 am)Chas Wrote: It is true in all senses - it is definitional.

Well, no. It isn't -- unless you're a relativist, a position that would seem to be undermined by your apparent concern for the objective value of truth -- as suggested by your very engagement.

(December 16, 2016 at 10:47 am)Mudhammam Wrote: @Em

That's awesome! I won't lie, the Phaedo's ending almost (ALMOST!) moved me to tears the second time I read it!
Check out Euthyphro, Apology, and Meno too! They're among the more "essential" dialogues.
Once you move on from Plato, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is great. And Epicurus' letters are pretty good too. Those are just a few suggestions to start scratching the surface, and include what you would likely cover if you took an ancient philosophy course in college.

Yeah me too... almost tears but not quite... just very moving and involving... like being a direct witness at a pivotal moment in history. I have the feeling I'm going to be reading it many times in the future; I want to really understand the arguments in depth, and see what arguments I'd put against it in a thorough refutation. My main objection is that it seems to take too much for granted... essences for instance are things I've only ever really thought about in neuroscientific terms (because it is neurons that 'extract' the essences of things they represent... that's what they do... so all this talk of categorisation, classes etc seems to me to be only describing how the brain works rather than talking about anything objective), and absolutes of beauty, truth, goodness etc again are things that I see as essentially arbitrary perceptions in the mind... that might be different, or non existent, or replaced with something else in different animals. So I don't take any aspect of perception for granted even if it appears to be something that is objectively 'out there'. But by reading this stuff more thoroughly I'm hoping I'll get a better and more foundational understanding of all this causes, essences, absolutes stuff and see if it really is at odds with my understanding of the mind, or whether I'm just conflating the two and there's room for both interpretations to co-exist.

Anyway, thanks for your further reading list I'll try and read them in roughly the order you suggest. At the moment I've got a 'complete works' compendium of Plato's to go through... you can't really argue with 49p for all of that on Kindle... so that should keep me busy and what's cool is the one I've got has got a lot of analysis and commentary as well, so that'll be very helpful in getting the very most out of each one

(December 16, 2016 at 4:27 pm)Emjay Wrote: Yeah me too... almost tears but not quite... just very moving and involving... like being a direct witness at a pivotal moment in history. I have the feeling I'm going to be reading it many times in the future; I want to really understand the arguments in depth, and see what arguments I'd put against it in a thorough refutation. My main objection is that it seems to take too much for granted... essences for instance are things I've only ever really thought about in neuroscientific terms (because it is neurons that 'extract' the essences of things they represent... that's what they do... so all this talk of categorisation, classes etc seems to me to be only describing how the brain works rather than talking about anything objective), and absolutes of beauty, truth, goodness etc again are things that I see as essentially arbitrary perceptions in the mind... that might be different, or non existent, or replaced with something else in different animals. So I don't take any aspect of perception for granted even if it appears to be something that is objectively 'out there'. But by reading this stuff more thoroughly I'm hoping I'll get a better and more foundational understanding of all this causes, essences, absolutes stuff and see if it really is at odds with my understanding of the mind, or whether I'm just conflating the two and there's room for both interpretations to co-exist.

Anyway, thanks for your further reading list I'll try and read them in roughly the order you suggest. At the moment I've got a 'complete works' compendium of Plato's to go through... you can't really argue with 49p for all of that on Kindle... so that should keep me busy and what's cool is the one I've got has got a lot of analysis and commentary as well, so that'll be very helpful in getting the very most out of each one

That sounds like a wonderful plan.  I'm currently in the latter stages of a project that began about two years ago, which was an undertaking to read all of the major philosophers and their primary works beginning with Plato (well, actually, I began with all of the important Ancient Near-Eastern texts, at least those that were known by the 1970s or whenever the compilation was published; I know many more have since been discovered; and Homer -- my goodness, if you haven't read Homer!) and working my up towards the present-day.  Currently, I am about to start Kant once I finish this more recent philosophy book by Derek Parfit called Reasons and Persons (I've taken a number of detours along the way), and honestly, though I now understand many of the issues much better, talk of abstract objects like numbers or essences or substances or beings is just really intuitively difficult, I think, because we are such sensual creatures.  You'll find this not only to be a common theme in Plato's works, but in most of Western philosophy -- the tension between mind and body and the attempt to make sense of how it is that subjects perceive objects, and what these tell us about both, one or the other, or neither; in a word, what is "truth" and how can one understand it?  The 19th century mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once famously said that, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."  I'm not entirely sure I'd disagree.

Now, when you write that 

Quote:My main objection is that it seems to take too much for granted... essences for instance are things I've only ever really thought about in neuroscientific terms (because it is neurons that 'extract' the essences of things they represent... that's what they do... so all this talk of categorisation, classes etc seems to me to be only describing how the brain works rather than talking about anything objective), and absolutes of beauty, truth, goodness etc again are things that I see as essentially arbitrary perceptions in the mind... that might be different, or non existent, or replaced with something else in different animals

I have to inquire, if neurons weren't, in evolutionary terms, designed to track truth -- not for the sake of truth but simply because the more accurate the representation of the world, the easier can harms be avoided and the more can energy-saving advantages be procured -- then what explains our success as a species at overcoming nature and the ignorance she fosters upon us all, especially when this ignorance can be so dangerous?  Did humans invent the concepts or merely the terms by which to communicate them?  Did they invent the "categories" -- of space and time and relation and action -- and the internal consistency that allows us to map our signs/symbols and their theoretical relations onto a world? And through it we have discovered ourselves to be this privileged species, living on a giant ball that orbits around a much larger ball of gas, all of which is in fact less than a spec of dust in the grand scheme of things!  It's all too odd to rule anything out, but it seems less odd to me that the world is as fundamentally abstract as it is physical, perhaps counterparts to the ancient notions of "form and "matter," rather than that the world is only a figment of my mind.  Can one really believe that the only difference in beauty between the Sistine Chapel and some ordinary six year old's finger painting is an arbitrary or irrational judgment formed by one's brain that the former is far more beautiful?

(December 16, 2016 at 8:55 pm)Mudhammam Wrote: [quote='Emjay' pid='1470630' dateline='1481920025']
I have to inquire, if neurons weren't, in evolutionary terms, designed to track truth

That's not design at all. But the only truth that neurons, or any other part of our apparatus, must be aware of is a statistical one-- that this form or that behavior leads to a persistence in information over individuals over time.

Very much of how we think is designed to filter out truth in favor of utility. That's why optical illusions work.

Quote:-- not for the sake of truth but simply because the more accurate the representation of the world, the easier can harms be avoided and the more can energy-saving advantages be procured -- then what explains our success as a species at overcoming nature and the ignorance she fosters upon us all, especially when this ignorance can be so dangerous?

Ignorance of the need to run away from a lion is dangerous. Ignorance of the fact that 99.999999% of everything we see is empty space probably is not dangerous. Therefore, we run from lions, and have trouble grasping that our desks are as empty as the solar system is.

Quote:Can one really believe that the only difference in beauty between the Sistine Chapel and some ordinary six year old's finger painting is an arbitrary or irrational judgment formed by one's brain that the former is far more beautiful?

I'd look at it like this: our arbitrary judgments are skewed by our nature, and beauty is a description of one of the experiences which are dependent on our nature. It is because people are naturally inspired by sunsets that we call sunsets beautiful, not because there is something intrinsically beautiful in them.

(December 16, 2016 at 8:55 pm)Mudhammam Wrote: The 19th century mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead ...

The majority of his life and work were in the 20th century.

(December 16, 2016 at 10:41 pm)bennyboy Wrote: That's not design at all.  But the only truth that neurons, or any other part of our apparatus, must be aware of is a statistical one-- that this form or that behavior leads to a persistence in information over individuals over time.

Very much of how we think is designed to filter out truth in favor of utility.  That's why optical illusions work.

Of course, it is trial and error. The ability to detect when we are being deceived, even if it takes a thousand years, is a perfect demonstration of how evolution works. Intelligence that has the ability to analyze its surroundings is going to decipher those instances in which an illusion is present rather quickly or perish, if the consequences are dire; otherwise, the deception will persist until some revelation occurs for reasons that, in so far as survival is concerned, are trivial. Hence,

(December 16, 2016 at 10:41 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Ignorance of the need to run away from a lion is dangerous.  Ignorance of the fact that 99.999999% of everything we see is empty space probably is not dangerous.  Therefore, we run from lions, and have trouble grasping that our desks are as empty as the solar system is.

The evolution of intelligence has evidently created entire new types of contests for Darwinian principles of selection to get to work. 100-200 thousand years ago, say, human beings were competing with each other and other hominids, at which point learning how to outsmart a lion became of one their least worries. It became, "How do I avoid enemy tribes that are strategizing to burn down my village, kill all the males, and rape all the women?" It is no coincidence that technological breakthroughs are often related to a (literal) arms race. The same is true with intelligence and the necessity of acquiring new knowledge. That it just so happened to lead us to the irrelevant -- again, in so far as survival is concerned -- discoveries about the origins of the universe, subatomic particles, art, literature, or anything else, were determined by causes that are in essence no different than those that drove us to run away from beasts of prey, or taught us that sex is both useful and fun.

(December 16, 2016 at 10:41 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I'd look at it like this: our arbitrary judgments are skewed by our nature, and beauty is a description of one of the experiences which are dependent on our nature.  It is because people are naturally inspired by sunsets that we call sunsets beautiful, not because there is something intrinsically beautiful in them.

Ok, but you kind of sound like you're just replacing "intrinsically beautiful" with "naturally inspiring" while I'm more inclined to see these as two different and equally true descriptions of our experiences in a world that imposes its properties on minds -- and that it designed in consequence of physical laws, including natural selection -- rather the other way around.