The Philosophy Now Forum

I was originally diagnosed as "schizophrenic" before my diagnosis was downgraded to "bipolar with psychotic features". But mental health isn't a concrete science, strictly speaking. It's just guesswork and inference. So who knows.

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2026 10:13 am I was originally diagnosed as "schizophrenic" before my diagnosis was downgraded to "bipolar with psychotic features". But mental health isn't a concrete science, strictly speaking. It's just guesswork and inference. So who knows.

When you say “who knows” are you questioning the possible existence of whether there’s an actual “knower” that exists that can be known, or does the question of “who knows” yield no definitive answer, or absolute truth?

The Shadow knows

Walker wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2026 4:32 pm The Shadow knows

Isn’t a shadow an hallucination?

radio was fantastic

-Imp

Hot radio made Roosevelt the nation's Daddy despite his policies.
McLuhan knows that radio is hot and dialogue is cool,
but only The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

Is The Shadow good, or evil?
(The answer can be hot as a lecture, or cool as a dialogue.)

(continued)

The guy behind Annie should not have said television is a hot medium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTSmbMm7MDg

According to McLuhan, television is a cool medium for communication.
According to McLuhan, dialogue is also a cool medium for communication.

A cool medium requires more thought from the receiver than a hot medium.

In a cool medium, asking the transmitter to answer questions is like asking the television to answer questions.
In a cool medium, the receiver answers the questions perceived by the receiver.

In a dialogue, simply asking questions does not fulfill the inherent qualities of a cool medium for communication.
In the dynamics of dialogue, simply asking questions is like cosplaying the alien plant in Little Shop of Horrors that demands to be fed.


(If you don't understand, rest assured there are folks who do.)

Walker wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2026 1:01 pm Hot radio made Roosevelt the nation's Daddy despite his policies.

LOL --- FDR gets the credit, but the policies were not his (did not originate with him). Facing the national crisis of the Depression, he assembled a cabinet of "national unity", sort of (the "big business" Republicans not included), and of course Elanor had lot of influence on what he did. His personal politics were far more moderate, but the need was to fend off both the left and the right.

For example ...... "The New Deal" ---- whose idea was this, name included, from which party?

But GREAT radio presence, and always present Fala was trained to create a distraction on cue when he needed an interruption in a "news conference, etc.
.

If the universe is an illusion, then what are illusions? Are they illusions of an illusory universe?

That's the problem with immaterialism and Descartes' stuff.

Something has to be constituting the illusion, see, so if an experienced material world is false, there must be a true material that's generating this false material world. If it isn't material, and material in toto is an illusion, then it's meaningless to say "material may be an illusion." What would that even mean? What's this 'material' stuff? There is only illusion constituting ilusions constituting illusions, i thought.

So either the material world we experience is real or it isn't, and we're a SIM that's being generated by a material thing we can't/don't experience. Ergo, materialism is true.

So, in fact, it's experience that is an illusion. The qualia, we call it. There's a material, and then there's sensations caused from materials interacting. But unless there is an experiencer, there would only be materials interacting, and sensation would just be ripples in space/time, you could say. Sensation, then, is that epiphenomenon through which we exist and are able to experience. Something emergent from the materials interacting. If you stretch time out far enough, the amount of time that experiencing things existed would be almost zero. The briefest Shakespearean spark of nervous energy and then.... dahkness and dumb particles floating around again for uncountable eons until they arrange again into this unlikely pattern we are that produces emergent phenomena that can experience sensation.

If we wager anything at all, let us have faith at least an eternal recurrence!

promethean75 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2026 6:27 pm So, in fact, it's experience that is an illusion. The qualia, we call it. There's a material, and then there's sensations caused from materials interacting. But unless there is an experiencer, there would only be materials interacting, and sensation would just be ripples in space/time, you could say.

Wrong place for this discussion. That said.......

The issue is how could material "transform" to the abstract? An area of 20th Century math might give us an answer. I'm talking about "Computer Science", not physical devices but considered as mathematical entities.

But if you want to skip ahead, think of the essence. A PHYSICAL thing (concentration of some chemical, amount of electric charge, the number of photons per second hitting a receptor, etc, CAN be considered as a "scalar value", a NUMBER, which is not a physical thing. These numbers, can be inputs to a neural net, something else in the realm of the abstract (not physical) but which can be emulated by a computer OR by your brain, the neurons connected by their axons in a network.

A computer "program" or its equivalent "function" is independent of the material hardware by which it "runs". Any attempt to understand the function in terms what is going on in THAT material "device" is obviously hopeless because the function could just as well be be being evaluated on a different material device OR one that exists only in the abstract << programs originally written to be run on real, material device X might still be running decades after the last X has been scrapped --- thus in my working days I once had to deal with a crash in a 7070 program (IBM machine from the 50's) that was running by being EMULATED by a modern machine --there was no physical 7070 involved >>

amazing what can be created with a series of on and off switches...

-Imp

I dunno wutchu mean, but once abstract numbers become inputs, they are no longer abstract entities but manifestations of sensation, or else they have no causal effect and are essentially imaginary. Machines (maacheens if you're mexican) don't function by following abstract rules... they funktion by physical sensations in circuitry, electrical impulses. So the computer isn't a Cartesian ghost sitting in his hard drive reading code and deciding what to do. Just like we don't decide how to act by reading statements like "be a good person," "don't steal," "hold the door," etc., in our heads. We hear the words, yeah, but they aren't behavior ordering code. This is just epiphenomena that have been ascribed to language through operant conditioning. Not the abstract value of moral behavior, but the physiological reward value of moral behavior is what drives and directs how we funktion.

promethean75 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2026 6:14 pm That's the problem with immaterialism and Descartes' stuff.

Something has to be constituting the illusion, see, so if an experienced material world is false, there must be a true material that's generating this false material world. If it isn't material, and material in toto is an illusion, then it's meaningless to say "material may be an illusion." What would that even mean? What's this 'material' stuff? There is only illusion constituting ilusions constituting illusions, i thought.

So either the material world we experience is real or it isn't, and we're a SIM that's being generated by a material thing we can't/don't experience. Ergo, materialism is true.

Well, that and the seeming fact that if I don't step out of the way of a semi-truck that is approaching me at 60mph, then the "illusion" that is the semi-truck seems like it will kill me for "real". Of course, I haven't been killed yet, so it's kind of a theory on my part in a strange sense, but I don't think I want to try it just to see if it will really kill me or not to step in front of a semi-truck moving at 60mph. It seems possible that we don't experience "reality" as it "is in itself", but our senses seem to be devoted to interpreting that "reality" in such a way as to keep us alive and relatively happy in a world full of danger or else things that bring pleasure to us.