Philosophy Now Forum

I dont think any body invents or can invent there own cosciousness.conscience is god in the observer.

I dont think billions of beings would be inventing there own personal consciousnesses.thats seems a strange idea to me mate.

jackles wrote:I dont think any body invents or can invent there own cosciousness.conscience is god in the observer.

I think you need to read what I said.

jackles wrote:I dont think billions of beings would be inventing there own personal consciousnesses.thats seems a strange idea to me mate.

Billions of conscious beings invent ideas everyday.

I'm not your "mate".

Ok mate.whoops sorry sqiure.

Kuznetzova wrote:

hammock wrote: Proper immaterialism would subsume the material category under an interpersonal / psychological category,

"...proper immaterialism..."

An initial impression [perhaps mistaken or irrelevant either way now] was that you seemed to be presenting Descartes' dualism as a monism of the immaterial ilk. I was not familiar enough with you or your agenda at the time to realize that these could be trollings posted simply for the sake of provoking equally fervent responses from others.

hammock wrote:But it is part of our trade to criticize and remain open to alternative possibilities of what is going on, or resist becoming trapped in a particular narrow view or speculation-stifling prejudice.

"..alternative possibilities"
"..narrow view"
"...speculation-stifling prejudice". (Oh! That's a ripe one.)

Fascinating, at least in terms of what your disparaging puzzlements suggest... Of this literally being a tyrannical form of scientism which you are preaching [which originally wasn't even implied upon my part or by the scientist character of that figurative analogy; though the philosopher characters may have took it partially that way from him, as they occasionally do ].

So -- if to again judge by the scornful aura of your question marks -- even characters depicted as literally "existing" in a computer virtual reality would all (ALL!) need to confine themselves to the appearances and internal-story of the game. Which the scientist character chose as his personal target of investigation (that is, not so much as a tiny minority permitted to stray under your grand vision of gestapo-ism). They should completely stifle their curiosity about their equivalent of a transcendent metaphysical situation, regardless of whether or not acquiring a validated knowledge of such was possible -- i.e., the "program / computer" ever allowing them to learn / prove anything genuinely positive about its level.

Hard to believe that even Hume, Kant, and Comte would have expected the whole lot of the human race to kowtow to their varieties of epistemological pessimism; a re-direction of speculative philosophy entirely toward the empirical / natural world of experience [internal metaphysics, if the "M" word should be invoked at all]. Certainly didn't stop Hegel from soon hopping right back to what neo-Kantians later took as a resurrection of pre-Kantian pursuits (the ironic tag of him being classified as a "post-Kantian" German idealist amusingly set aside). Even less unfaithful Schopenhauer was waving about frantically that he had discovered the thing-in-itself as being "will", though it at least still seemed dependent upon description rather than the producing of a phenomenal object as evidence.

Answering the TS:

The concise world, that's fine by me.
But then, what I am, you are, the soul is and so on, what does it matter? As long as people don't try to make me see myself as just a small part of alternative 1.
I am my universe, and living in the outside universe too. I suppose Heidegger was kind of with me on that one. When I die I'll don't give sh*t about any universe. Or so I do belive.

Regarding the O P : the best means of investigating the Universe is the Scientific Method. It is as free from subjective interpretation as is possible
to get with any system that has human interaction as standard now. One of its fail safe features is its eternal quest for scientific knowledge with
no reference to anything other than the reliability of such information. That can only be ensured when it is tested to absolute destruction or as
close to as is possible. The other fail safe is that it has zero respect for anyone no matter who they be. Other than having no interpretation on
Nature at all it is as rigorous a system as is possible given an ease with which humans are prone to bias when referencing physical phenomena
and what it is and why it exists and how it inter acts with other physical phenomena and other questions of that nature. And so on and so on

But although I am a physicalist / materialist I would not and do not think that philosophy should be disregarded as an academic discipline though
I do not think it is as rigorous as the hard sciences and mathematics. Mathematics that references the laws of physics is an axiomatic deductive
discipline that requires positive proof for any proposition. The same degree of rigour cannot be applied to philosophy now given how ideas can
not be falsified. Though that does not mean philosophy does not have any place in the human understanding of the Universe and all that as it
obviously does. But it just cannot be subject to the same exacting standards such as mathematics and the sciences of physics and chemistry

I think you are on a wrong track boiling life into 1 liners. Meaningless and oversimplifyed, which only can mislead and conceal truth.

surreptitious57 wrote:
But although I am a physicalist / materialist I would not and do not think that philosophy should be disregarded as an academic discipline. Though I do not think it is as rigorous as the hard sciences and mathematics however. Mathematics which references
the laws of physics is an axiomatic deductive discipline than requires positive proof for any proposition. That same degree of
rigour cannot be applied to philosophy given how ideas cannot be falsified. But that does not mean that philosophy does not
have any place in the human understanding of the Universe and all that as it obviously does. It just cannot be subject to the
same exacting standards as mathematics and the hard sciences however

Mathematics and science has it's place, I see it as the execution phase of a project. And you would not have an architect doing the implementation. So there's no point in whining about science finding out details about the "ideal horse", the whereabouts in universe, in the human body and so on. Philosophy has served it's purpose there.

I claim that philosophy is an important thing in it's own right, and is also maybe a necessary part of science. It's not like "we'll set out experimenting and calculating on just anything and see what we come up with". You come up with hypotheses that you test. And in those early parts of the scientific project what you do is something that comes closer to philosophizing.

But, as an academical discipline I don't know. If philosophy could find it's place in society, maybe that will not happend, but it might be a good thing. If we define the realm of philosophy as "the things that is not yet possible to successfully handle by science and scientific methods", you have quite a lot to put your teeth into.

Guys like Locke, Marx, Spencer and later Popper and Sartre really made a difference, for good or bad, but it seems as if the academical philosophy did get lost in the 20th century. Maybe it was the wars that spoiled things. Maybe the Husserl way of trying to make science of philosophy. I don't know. But to me things now seem rather inward and backward at the philosophical faculties at the universities. Why? I have only bothered about philosophy for the last five years and am very much an amateur in the both meanings of that word, so I cannot say. You who can - why?

hammock wrote: Even less unfaithful Schopenhauer was waving about frantically that he had discovered the thing-in-itself as being "will", though it at least still seemed dependent upon description rather than the producing of a phenomenal object as evidence.

Well Schopenhauer was a vitalist.

Does this mean he was "stupid"? Absolutely not. The greatest minds and the highly educated men of the 19th century were often vitalists. Schopenhauer's star pupil, Frederik Nietzsche, in turn was a vitalist himself.

So even though they have been largely debunked by modern biology, I think they were asking the right questions. In our contemporary times, we ask the same question in a different framework. We would like to know how common life is in the galaxy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrobiology

Kuznetzova wrote:Which of these scenarios is more reasonable to you?

1.

An elegant, concise, universal perspective that is consistent with all known facts?




2.

Or do you prefer, disembodied, immaterial Mind-substances?

Number one is an empty platitude, number two is framed as an insult.
What you have asked is..

What do you prefer.

1) something preferable
2) Something else you don't like.

i.e. you have answered your won question by the way you choose to phrase it.