Existentialism...

Avi said:
Haha, NA, this is very funny ! Isn't that really the point of existentialism anyway ? It pushes complexity to the limit, so we get confused trying to understand what we are trying to understand :).
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hehe its only because l read a little [concerning personal identity] that l am not clear, l didn't mention his positional/non positional aspects of consciousness...systems or theories are always more complicated particularly if it trying to completely overthrow the dominant one ie Cartesian substance dualism. Thats why l said earlier one would need to read previous influential continental [many of them jewish btw] philosophers, eg leibniz, kant, hegel and husserl.
Sartre took many of these thinkers terms and ways of dealing with the phenomenon of being [and the being of phenomena] and put his own twist in, particularly 'nothingness'. The old scholastic meaning of existence 'standing forth' [gk] = 'mode of being of a being that receives its being from another being than itself' ie g#d, in Husserl it is the 'condition' of standing forth from Being [presumably just being], for Sartre it was from nothing [this is from the edinburgh ency. of continental philosophy which points out Sartre' father was absent, compared to Husserls 'good' father]. Heideggar also describes his dasein as making a stand, which has care and concern for a world [hood] already there, but he's another one that has lots of new unfamiliar terms in delineating the ontology of being, which seems complicated because it hadn't really been done before, but is just an unpacking of common sense knowledge which we take for granted; apparently Heideggar's phenomenolgy put the brakes on the plausibility of A.I. because of all the inumerable value/function predicates of such simple things, like a hammer [he uses that analogy a lot].

Avi said:
This reminds me of some of the old Woody Allen movies, in them I think he was parodying the existentialist writers. Especially in "Love and Death" that was a really funny one. The final scene has him trying to outmanuever the Angel of Death !!
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Woody was, is the best, l loved his self depreceating humour [though lets not talk about him getting off with his adopted daughter:eek:]!
 
Following up things on this vein I was again taken back to a son of Edinburgh like me but born back in 1711, before the Act of Union that made the UK. The following article is worth reading as it offers a great familiarisation and of course shows that the Scots are the smartest cookies on the planet. As if the invention of whisky had not already convinced you!!:D
David Hume

From that:

Hume practised what he preached. Although when in the midst of his philosophical deliberations he was often perturbed by their sceptical implications, these worries soon dissolved when he rejoined human company and had a game of billiards. This may seem shallow, but it is in fact a mature recognition that those who claim to be nihilists are just posturing: nobody really believes in nothing.

The lessons he taught are desperately relevant today, when certainty is only found in religious fundamentalism, yet uncertainty risks a descent into postmodern relativism and intellectual anarchy. In this climate, how do we resolve ethical disputes such as those that rage over stem-cell research, euthanasia and civil liberties versus civic security? How can we trust science when it gets so many things wrong? How do we resolve the great ideological clashes of East and West when there are no unquestionable fundamentals upon which to build agreement? What we need is a Humean approach to provide the intellectual ballast necessary to stay afloat in a sea of uncertainty.

Consider the question of ethical values. Hume agreed with moral sceptics on several key points. He did not believe it was possible to establish absolute moral values . Religion could certainly not provide these, for there is simply no way we can trust the authority of religious texts or leaders. Nothing can be true or false because a religion says it is, but only because we have good reasons to believe it is true or false.

I hope you are reading this Earl ;) I'm a Humeanist (sic) :p

An interesting idea is how our new found ability, the WWW, to discuss these topics will change perceptions over time. In his day Hume had to pussyfoot round laws that granted church ridiculous and unearned privileges over what could be published. Today we can venture into territory unbounded. Will the WWW allow a mass re-education without the bias of suspension of belief compromise we are fed through our cultures. I hope so.

Hume is a man I am now going to embark on knowing a lot about.
 
This is from the Wiki bio on Hume:

"According to the standard interpretation of Hume on personal identity, he was a Bundle Theorist, who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of interconnected perceptions linked by relations of similarity and causality; or, more accurately, that our idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle."

This "The idea of such a bundle" fits in effortlessly to that article on chaotic brain theory.... told you its everywhere!
 
Tao_Equus said:
Hume is a man I am now going to embark on knowing a lot about.
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Steady on Tao, I’ve read about Hume in one of my B- books! This is because his notion is pretty much similar to the Buddhist notion of the concept of the self being derived from a bundle (of the five skandhas).

s.
 
I am wholly unfamiliar with David Hume. So, went to see if there was something comparing his thought to Buddhism and found this:
Netscape Search

It's a long philosophical essay examining their confluence and reminds me of why I typically came close to falling asleep in undergraduate philosophy classes.:D Must warn you all-it contains allusions to materialism. :pearl
 
earl said:
I am wholly unfamiliar with David Hume. So, went to see if there was something comparing his thought to Buddhism and found this:
Netscape Search

It's a long philosophical essay examining their confluence and reminds me of why I typically came close to falling asleep in undergraduate philosophy classes.:D Must warn you all-it contains allusions to materialism. :pearl
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Look this is the latest link you've provided to something that frankly for a skimmer like me is very challenging!

I too have found Western philosophy to be soporific (unsurprising that they are anagrams of each other...in Albanian).

I shall read them in the fullness of time!

s.
 
earl said:
Must warn you all-it contains allusions to materialism. :pearl
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Good, I much prefer to work with what has some material substance. My take is that there is a universe full of the material, better to know that before trying to know the immaterial.
 
Rather than post a link to another looong written piece, since we'd lastly been discussing Hume & Buddhism, here's a short one-just a few paragraphs which gives a concise Buddhist view of brain science and consciousness. Doing this for your edification on matters Buddhist Tao. Comes from a Buddhist news channel-yes there is such an animal.:) earl
Netscape Search
 
earl said:
... here's a short one-just a few paragraphs which gives a concise Buddhist view of brain science and consciousness.
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As a Buddhist I was interested to read the article and found it a mostly accurate description of Buddhist thought and mine as well. Here is the key parts as I see pertaining to your continued focus [obsession?] on materialism.

So, while a growing number of contemporary neuroscientists adopt a material monist view that reduces all mental phenomena to brain processes, Buddhism tends to adopt a non-material monist view that sees formlessness as the ultimate substrate of inner experience.​

It's strange to me that the article makes the claim that a "growing number of contemporary neuroscientists adopt a material monist view that reduces all mental phenomena to brain processes..." without providing any proof that this is so. When making a claim along these lines, it is helpful to have some evidence to back it up.

But let's assume for a moment that the claim is true. Is this a wrong approach in studying the mind? I don't think it is. I see a parallel to it and the study of the universe. We start by by examining the structures that we can see and measure. So the study of space began with the Sun, the moon, eclipses, planets, stars, comets, retrograde motion, orbits. As we increased out knowledge of this phenomena and improved our ability to examine and measure them the scope of investigation pushed deeper.

It has only been within the last 100 years that science realized that the "material" of the universe could not fully explain its development and structure. Today theories are being tested to confirm the presence of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. If confirmed, these exotic components of the universe will join molecules and atoms in the family of matter. What was once undetectable and mysterious will become known and natural. And still science will probe deeper.

Science, likewise should begin its studies of the mind based on the physical, the measurable, the detectable. Discovering the physical aspects of the brain will help to reveal how it functions as our organ of thought as well as reveal the gaps in our understanding of consciousness. The greater out understanding of the physical, the more precisely we'll undertake the further probing of the unknown and mysterious.
 
Well CZ since I'm aware of at least 1 neuroscientist who is Buddhist, probably not all are die-hard materialists.:p But yeah, most do seem to want to reduce all of consciousness down to brain cell boogie and that the vast bulk of Buddhists don't buy. Shunryu Suzuki a well known contemporary Zen teacher long dead-my favorite ones are the dead ones:p- used the well known phrase in discussing mind and body: "not one, not two." Those Zen folks really know how to clear up any confusion.:) earl
 
If something is not material how do you quantify it? My guess is that there is nothing that does not have material presence. And so everything is best approached through looking at its material characteristics. If I am wrong then I would first like it clearly stated what is there that is not material.
 
Tao_Equus said:
If something is not material how do you quantify it? My guess is that there is nothing that does not have material presence. And so everything is best approached through looking at its material characteristics. If I am wrong then I would first like it clearly stated what is there that is not material.
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well, I think we'd agree that everything that exists has a material effect. Beyond that, eh. As I've said before, in science it is often more the case of interpretation of data than data-gathering, (though if you're talking about "hard" science as being the gold standard of proof, then there is much in the human expereince that cannot not be "tested" nor probably will be in the future). But as to interpetation of data, this is why I've said elsewhere that science alone will not definitively establish the "truth" about consciousness and what transpires within in as anyone who chooses to establish what ultimately exists or doesn't exist based on data alone then has to fall back on underlying explanatory systems, be they religious or secular. earl
 
earl said:
(though if you're talking about "hard" science as being the gold standard of proof, then there is much in the human expereince that cannot not be "tested" nor probably will be in the future).
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You have a very pessimistic view of human potential.

Here we are, as a species, barely out of our infancy, and you've already decided what humans are capable of knowing?

I have no idea what the future holds. How can you be so certain?
 
citizenzen said:
You have a very pessimistic view of human potential.

Here we are, as a species, barely out of our infancy, and you've already decided what humans are capable of knowing?

I have no idea what the future holds. How can you be so certain?
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Because, whatever data science collects now or in the future still will filter through the belief systems of humans.:) But, I'm definitely a "believer" that I won't wait til science finds some supportive data to establish an experience we cannot explain has happened to consider it actually happened. Take NDE's for example. All who have had them do not require science to confirm they had them, though how such is interpretted will no doubt vary from person to person. earl
 
earl said:
Because, whatever data science collects now or in future still will filter through the belief systems of humans.:)
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Oh... I get it. That must be why we still believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.
 
earl said:
Take NDE's for example. All who have had them do not require science to confirm they had them, though how such is interpretted will no doubt vary from person to person. earl
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Maybe they "do not require science to confirm" but are they then actually interested in knowing the cause and mechanics of that experience? Or are they simply going on an emotionally charged circular form of thinking that will support their baseless and unshakeable forgone conclusions? People like you get into this and then start devouring everything they can, and there is no shortage of myth-mongers in that field, yet never bother with the negative information. I think your real problem with the science is that it has studied NDE's and so far has found nothing to support the claims and this pisses you off. So you blame the science.
 
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