(2023-07-09, 11:38 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]I would agree that Panpsychism, at least when we talk about conscious particles building up our consciousness, seems deeply flawed and a kind of last gasp pseudo-Materialism.
I guess if one uses certain types of definitions that may be so. However for myself, something like panpsychism is almost indistinguishable from the variety of idealism that seems to be favoured. I don't really take these things all that seriously, I certainly don't enjoy the game of "my *ism is better than your *ism" which I find unsatisfying.
Though I would say that materialism is pretty much a dead end as it defines as out-of-scope most of the important aspects of existence and is thus not even an attempt.
(2023-07-10, 01:13 PM)Typoz Wrote: [ -> ]I guess if one uses certain types of definitions that may be so. However for myself, something like panpsychism is almost indistinguishable from the variety of idealism that seems to be favoured. I don't really take these things all that seriously, I certainly don't enjoy the game of "my *ism is better than your *ism" which I find unsatisfying.
Though I would say that materialism is pretty much a dead end as it defines as out-of-scope most of the important aspects of existence and is thus not even an attempt.
Oh I agree that certain "top-down" Panpsychism and certain "Neutral Monisms" that are apparently types of Panpsychism seem to have the same implications as a variety of Idealisms.
Ultimately it likely doesn't matter too much which of these we pick though it does seem certain "isms" are selected more for what they can exclude than what their genuine explanatory power could be. Materialism/Physicalism is the most obvious one but I suspect any metaphysics that can reject Survival is also favored.
(2023-07-10, 10:29 AM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]I like the expression "pseudo-Materialism"! It seems to express the fact that nobody ever elaborates what it means, or invents experiments to explore it further.
I think what you are really expressing is the fact that science has been hugely distorted by Christianity in its most muscular period, when it solved philosophical problems by burning people at the stake.
I don't know if this is completely accurate - it seems Christianity help[ed] buttress a variety of ideas such as Laws of Nature that made scientists like Newton feel the cosmos was in fact readable and not inscrutable. Also perhaps worth noting that gravity was criticized as an "occult" force when proposed?
Quote:Physical theories and experimental methods have matured immeasurably over the centuries, but experiments and ideas in non-physical reality have developed at a slower pace, but potential principles like Dualism get argued over using the standards of today.
I think this really depends on what we mean by Dualism. Is it Des Cartes' Res Cogitans vs Res Extensa, because then we have to ask what it means for mind/soul to lack extension because this contradicts a good deal - if not all - Survival evidence.
Quote:Science has to mature with a simple mental concept - such as Dualism - before it is possible to hang additional ideas, such as might be needed to account for 'deep weird' phenomena, onto it.
My worry is the simple mental concept is too simple to accommodate the evidence?
Quote:If science accepted Dualism, and maybe another concept, such as something to absorb the fact that time seems to behave differently in the other realm, it could begin to mature non-physically after 400-odd years of dithering induced by burnings at the stake and subsequent loathing for religion and all it represents.
I think this might be the crux of our current disagreement - It is not clear to me there is an "other realm", so much as we are in an island of "mundane" physical reality that is in fact part of the "Other" all the time.
Quote:I don't think there is a shortcut here, any more than a genius back in the time of Newton could have argued the case for GR and QM.
I do sympathize with a certain kind of Dualism, given that we have rules for Normal "Visible" existence and there seem to be rules - of a less strict, less universal sort - for the "Invisible" Other (Survival, Psi, UFOs, Deep Weird).
Accepting this dichotomy could be useful I think, because it doesn't demand one pick a metaphysical position. One simply accepts the division for practical purposes. Of course we have to keep in mind the "Visible" has a foundation on the very bizarrely chaotic quantum realm, and the "Invisible" arguably includes the Eternal Truths of Mathematics/Logic...
(2023-07-10, 10:29 AM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]I think what you are really expressing is the fact that science has been hugely distorted by Christianity in its most muscular period, when it solved philosophical problems by burning people at the stake.
I think the bold is correct, but I'd disagree with the rest of your statement.
I think science has been distorted by organized religion (predominately Christianity but certainly Judaism, Islam, etc as well). The distortion I see is different however. Scientists were persecuted by these religious organizations for challenging dogma and authority. That fight continues to this day even with science being in a much more powerful societal position.
The distortion today is science's fear of giving any type of credence to any aspect of religious tradition. The discussion on ID really illustrates this in my view. Theorizing some role for intelligence in evolution seems imminently reasonable from a scientific perspective, yet the mainstream biologists generally dismiss this out of hand. This distortion is due to their fear that the religious community will coopt such a theory as a proof for their tradition; their God. I get that fear; its reasonable certainly based on history.
But.... its a distortion and it seems to be becoming more and more obvious.
(2023-07-10, 02:28 PM)Silence Wrote: [ -> ]But.... its a distortion and it seems to be becoming more and more obvious.
It is interesting there can be discussions of our reality being Simulated, and this is seen as acceptable to some degree...but "God forbid" one suggests the designer(s) aren't mortal programmers but minds that are in some way utilizing abilities that are not typing programs in a computer...
"Holiday was experiencing a problem that is familiar to students of the paranormal. They begin as more or less open-minded sceptics, prepared to give serious consideration to any evidence that presents itself, but determined not to indulge in any self-deceptions. Finally, the sheer weight of evidence convinces them that something odd is going on, and they try to create what Aldous Huxley called a ‘minimum working hypothesis’, an explanation that covers the basic facts. This may be, for example, telepathy. Lethbridge saw a ‘ghost’—a man dressed in riding gear—in the rooms of a university friend, and theorised that someone else may have been thinking about the man, and that his own mind somehow ‘picked up’ the image—like ‘a television picture without the sound.’ But he was forced to drop this explanation as he encountered other examples of the paranormal. And this tends to be the experience of most serious investigators. Whenever they have formulated a watertight ‘general theory’, they stumble upon some new fact that simply refuses to fit in. And they have to extend the theory. Then they find still more awkward facts and extend it still further. And in no time at all, their original neat, symmetrical theory looks like an old sack stuffed with rubbish.
This was Ted Holiday’s experience, and it explains why The Goblin Universe begins with a sentence that sounds like a confession of failure: ‘We inhabit a strange cosmos where nothing is absolute, final or conclusive. Truth is an actor who dons one mask after another and then vanishes through a secret door in the stage scenery . . . ‘ In fact, he is merely expressing a conviction that strikes every paranormal investigator sooner or later: that the universe probably contains other intelligences besides our own. When the Society for Psychical Research was formed in 1882, a group of distinguished philosophers and scientists hoped to study ‘the paranormal’ with the same scientific methods they used for studying meteorites or bacteria. They were, in fact, successful to a remarkable degree, establishing the reality of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis beyond all possible doubt. But their investigations into the problem of life after death were far less successful because their results were so contradictory with false information. G.K. Chesterton, who devoted some time to experiments with the ouija board, agreed that the seances produced unexplainable results, but added: ‘The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power is that it tells lies.’ "
- Colin Wilson's Intro to Holiday's The Goblin Universe
Charles Fort:
"But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They’re there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we’re all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese."
=-=-=
"I’d suggest, to start with, that we’d put ourselves in the place of deep-sea fishes: How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above? They wouldn’t try— Or it’s easy enough to think of most of us as deep-sea fishes of a kind."
=-=-=
"I now have a theory that our existence, as a whole, is an organism that is very old—a globular thing within a starry shell, afloat in a super-existence in which there may be countless other organisms—and that we, as cells in its composition, partake of, and are ruled by, its permeating senility. The theologians have recognized that the ideal is the imitation of God. If we be a part of such an organic thing, this thing is God to us, as I am God to the cells that compose me. When I see myself, and cats, and dogs losing irregularities of conduct, and approaching the irreproachable, with advancing age, I see that what is ennobling us is senility. I conclude that the virtues, the austerities, the proprieties are ideal in our existence, because they are imitations of the state of a whole existence, which is very old, good, and beyond reproach. The ideal state is meekness, or humility, or the semi-invalid state of the old. Year after year I am becoming nobler and nobler. If I can live to be decrepit enough, I shall be a saint."
[Edit by Laird: the post to which nbtruthman was responding has been moved to its own thread:
The decombination problem, related arguments, and potential solutions: an analysis]
A comment from one who is not greatly involved in and tutored in academic philosophy:
I applaud this admirable and very thorough extended analysis, one that took a lot of effort.
Apparently most of the thinkers' concepts so excellently reviewed here implicitly or explicitly deny survival and an afterlife. My inclination is to thereby simply discount them as invalid based on what I consider to trump philosophical arguments for many forms of monism and idealism - the existence of the large body of empirical evidence that has accumulated for some form of modified interactional dualism, or in other terms, some form of the filter/transmitter/receiver model. An apparent dualism of some form that appears to necessarily exist, because it accomplishes and manifests the observed (in paranormal phenomena such as NDEs) dualistic survival of physical death of the human spirit as a separate mobile immaterial center of consciousness. Where an apparent underlying ultimate monistic sea of "mind stuff" has differentiated into two separate "realms" of two very different substances - the mental and the physical. Out of this large body of evidence, probably the best is the NDE data, which indeed was the focus of most of the winning Bigelow contest essays.
(2023-12-20, 03:52 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]A comment from one who is not greatly involved in and tutored in academic philosophy:
I applaud this admirable and very thorough extended analysis, one that took a lot of effort.
Apparently most of the thinkers' concepts so excellently reviewed here implicitly or explicitly deny survival and an afterlife. My inclination is to thereby simply discount them as invalid based on what I consider to trump philosophical arguments for many forms of monism and idealism - the existence of the large body of empirical evidence that has accumulated for some form of modified interactional dualism, or in other terms, some form of the filter/transmitter/receiver model. An apparent dualism of some form that appears to necessarily exist, because it accomplishes and manifests the observed (in paranormal phenomena such as NDEs) dualistic survival of physical death of the human spirit as a separate mobile immaterial center of consciousness. Where an apparent underlying ultimate monistic sea of "mind stuff" has differentiated into two separate "realms" of two very different substances - the mental and the physical. Out of this large body of evidence, probably the best is the NDE data, which indeed was the focus of most of the winning Bigelow contest essays.
As a functional dualism sure, but as a metaphysical argument this would be like saying radio waves or a router's wireless signal proves that there are two distinct substances.
That said, there is no definite resolution to the question of substance, or even how stuff of the same substance can interact. I'd even say the Hard Problem of Causation means demarcating substances is quite difficult.