In what universe isn’t everything subject to interpretation?
Okay interpretations of increasing, or decreasing, accuracy.
What are you going to do about it?
It’s not unrealistic to see people as unified wholes instead of merely collections of parts. That’s like…the bare minimum.
Except they didn’t do the science, what you linked me is more philosophy than science.
Uhhh no, you can think yourself into a morality and it happens to us every day. Understanding my chemistry won’t do anything for me, and my history is a matter of interpretation. That being how you look at your past impacts how it affects you. We also know the people tend to not try as hard or lose motivation when something is viewed as inevitable or that they have no agency in the matter.
I’m attempting to learn with being human but my argument that you either ignore or cannot address is that the notion of our reality being merely a construct of our design tends to undermine much of what we take to be human.
I swear it’s like you haven’t read any of my explanations on my thoughts and just read what you want to.
And the only reasons any of that stuff still holds today is because we don’t view it as constructed, again you’re not really making a good case for your point here. Slavery was seen as an evil to destroy and often appeals against it were made based on perceived eternal values inherent to all people: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, dignity, all that jazz.
People make appeals to immutable facts in order to push for change to society, which is ironic. Why do you think “born this way” was used for so long for LGBT folks.
No matter how you try to spin it society relies on this precarious contradiction of seeing it as immutable and yet as something we can change. If we didn’t reify aspects of it then no word would carry any weight, at all. Laws would be more like suggestions same with any system you’d propose.
Hence why the end where they talk about the benefits of it isn’t really true, especially given how history worked out and the kinds of arguments people used in order to push for change.
Like I said, Critical Theory can only break stuff down it has no plan or method for setting up anything. Again you’re ignoring the points I made about the issues with realizing society is socially constructed.
We almost had something going there. You were making some solid statements about where you stood, what you believe, but it’s falling apart again. I didn’t say people are merely collections, that’s your strawman version of the things you read. You’ve introduced another term for whatever it is you think about the way humans are constructed with this “unified wholes”. I don’t know what that is, or how it could be that we are that. You need to describe that if you want me to comment on it.
Sapolsky did the science of the neurology of self. Berger did the sociology of the social construction of reality. Others since have discussed the implications, which is what philosophy is, taking facts and data and logic, then applying them to the whole of human experience.
And this is tiresome. When you get frustrated, you blame me for not getting what you’re saying.
That’s true, but, tough beans. And you are over generalizing, since there plenty of people who can discuss this without losing motivation. If we have been wrong about free will and “self” for thousands of years, then we need to take a look at that. We should be constantly asking who we are and how we got here. When we don’t, we perpetuate myths like how the color of the skin is related to intelligence. That was considered inevitable, it was considered natural, questioning that is exactly what I’m talking about.
This is what we are discussing. If you are going to simply state it as natural fact, then you are not inquiring into the possibilities of the implications of recent discoveries. Those discoveries connect with and shed light on ancient wisdom about being-ness. You are at the beginning of this conversation after being on this forum for over two years.
It’s pretty evident, seeing people as people and not just aggregates of different parts like eyes, ears, nose, etc. Or if you want to be even more reductive as just a pile of cells. It didn’t fall apart, I’ve been consistent on this.
Sapolsky is just one voice in the matter and as far as I can tell neuroscience doesn’t have enough evidence for no free will. Also no, that’s not what Philosophy is, not even close. You mentioned “facts, data, and knowledge” but how each of those are defined and what counts as knowledge has been an age old debate in Philosophy. In short Philosophy is the starting point, everything else you said comes after.
But no, what you gave me in that link was more philosophy than science. Arguing about what is “real” and how to define it falls into that camp.
Well when I explain my position only for you to read something else into it then it does get tiring.
You can’t just “tough beans” because that tells me you’ve put zero thought into the consequences of it. I’m not over generalizing, even some ardent determinists see the utility in free will as an illusion that helps. Nor do they have a plan for how society would work since from culture to entertainment to morality, everything depends on belief in agency.
We shouldn’t really be asking who we are and how we got here, because that’s largely irrelevant. The point is we are here now and what to do about it. Trying to figure the other part out just leads to infinite regress.
Also you’re only picking the bad examples, so of course it would sound better to question that. But there’s also things like art, aesthetics, sports, movies, entertainment, and more. All that depends on people believing in some part that there is something solid to it all. Or to borrow from the Hicks quote, the ride only works when people don’t see it as a ride.
You also don’t see how your route eventually ends to statis, because if it’s all subject to change, if it’s not grounded in anything “solid” for people to unite around then you’ve got nothing. Like I said, you can’t only tear down, you need a plan for building something else. Otherwise you’re just ego stroking.
I’m not at the beginning but more like the end. The beginning is more like people are people and they exist and so do other animals. The end however is questioning whether life really exists since we can’t agree on a hard definition of it, what it means to be human, at what point do cells become more than mere individuals and start being humans.
It’s odd to hear you bring up ancient wisdom as well, especially since I was the one citing that from the start and you just dismiss it as people in the past thinking such. Make up your mind. You say implications of “recent discoveries” but that’s so vague as to be meaningless. You’re the one playing catch-up along with them while I’m here trying to wrap my head around what they mean:
“You” don’t actually exist in the world. Your consciousness does not exist in the world. The world does not exist in the world.
Like I said though, society functions through contradictions that work, much like ecosystems in nature. Things have to be seen as immutable and yet changeable. Without reification then no system you replace the old with would hold because no one would view is as something solid or something to really consider, it’d just be “your opinion”.
Civil rights wasn’t won with such…flimsy appeals to social construction, that’s not how people work. Hence why I said that link was kinda “ivory tower” stuff.
Yes, you’ve consistenlty used a strawman. I don’t say that people are just a collection of cells. It’s been a while, but here, and other places on this forum, I’ve pointed the logical fallacy of saying people are “just” parts, or “just” chemicals.
He’s the one you quoted in this thread. When you have trouble making your point, you use an example. When that example doesn’t support your stance, you say, ‘well, not just that example, lots of others….”
Sure, the experience of free will and the experience of the self are something we have. That’s why we talk about it. That’s why we are trying to figure what they are, it they are illusions.
Yeah, this is where I have to think it’s not worth engaging with you. I agree with you, “The point is we are here now and what to do about it.” But you don’t want to find agreements, you want to argue. You ask a serious question in the topic of this thread, then you don’t even want to define the terms of it, like “human.”
Yeah.
I do not dismiss Buddhism or indigenous culture or Aristotle. When you link something, I critique what I think is inaccurate. I separate the original work from the conclusions that are drawn from it. I can’t rehash all of that in every post, so in this one, I only made a reference to it.
Ok, I’ll give you that one.
And I said that he himself doesn’t have a plan for how society works without free will. Your example of saying to be more compassionate doesn’t really refute my point.
You brought it up first and now what I say we shouldn’t be doing that you get mad about it?
So then what recent discoveries align with ancient wisdom.
Kinda busy right now. But, basically, the Buddhist idea of there not being a self and don’t forget the Buddha didn’t want to talk any kind of after life either. Other shamanistic cultures had that too, they might use ceremonies, some including drugs, to get out their “normal” day-to-day thinking, expand the mind, whatever that means. Seeing connections to nature were also important, how that relates to our human-nature.
But then how does one live without a self?
You’re already doing it. I have tried to say before that you can live without answering every question about what it is to be human. We evolved for a couple of million years without having words for it, without anything that looked like what we now call philosophy. Everyone I know and hundreds of things I’ve read, report a “sense of self.” Neuroscience and meditation or some ancient Scripture can’t take that away.
But I’m not already doing it, I still believe there is some “me” something I can call my own. We might have been able to live then but not now, now that we are more aware.
Like back then we couldn’t have know how flawed our senses are like this says: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-greatest-mind-fucks/answer/Pete-Bahba?share=1&srid=Xs9v
But now that we know it calls into question what we take to be real and to exist.
Now consider that everything that you perceive and feel as out there, is happening in your skull. That field of awareness that seems to extend throughout the room and over where you hear a noise is in the mind. There is an external physical world, but your mind is generating an illusion or projection based on the 2d inputs of your small retinas and eardrums only inches from the brain. Even the sensations of your feet which are the farthest thing you can directly sense, can be replicated by stimulating points on the brain, so they are not “over there” either. That sense of space is all your imagination at work.
We project our own imagination/awareness out into the tools that we use, so that they become part of us. We “inhabit” them. One can also do this with the whole world similar to what I’ve described here. But funny things can happen when you do (kundalini?), like an irresistible force is engaging with an immovable object. Yoga texts suggest that concentration combined with imagination can be hazardous and I agree.
IMO This thought experiment is very physical, and not detached, but engaged with what actually is happening in that noodle up there that everyone else is pushing and pulling on for their own reasons. If we are attached to illusions that is far from the physical.
I used to do a variation of your last point, in that if I was out walking I used to assume that I was in reality perfectly still and that the entire universe moved around me. Which I happen to believe is what is “actually” going on, but never mind.
It has a direct impact on one’s perception, almost to the point where you could loose your balance or walk into something.
Well, relativity would say you could be right. An observe in an inertial frame is always motionless
Sometimes when I walk I try to be aware of the sensation of my whole head, and oddly enough because the “presence” of the screen of the optical view, my head ends up feeling 2D, like I am my viewport.
Yes, but our everyday senses do not agree with relativity!
Or at least not the common conditioning.
Nowadays I try to refrain from experimenting while walking. Especially since a couple of days back when I tripped and strained something in one foot. Being a bit metaphysical can have its occupational hazards too.
Though I’m not sure they understand relativity since the effects the describe only really happen at the speed of light and not in our every day.
That’s what I meant. You believe there is some “me”. I don’t believe there is a “self”, however you want to describe it. We’re both getting by in this world. Some people don’t think about it all, they’re doing fine.
If you don’t know what you’re talking about, better to remain silent. Inertial frames don’t require speed of light travel. This discussion from reddit starts by talking about how we say the sun rises because for most of human history we didn’t know we were rotating in space. We were moving but our inertial frame was that we were still in space. Even after we figured out the earth was round, it took hundreds of years to understand all the motions in which we are moving.
More than that, in a rotating reference frame, we need to introduce fictitious forces to explain the motion of the Sun, Moon, planets, stars, galaxies… we have to slap everything in the universe with huge amounts of force to get away with this explanation. Where are those forces coming from? It’s arguably more “natural” to pick an inertial frame (or something close to it) where we can explain all of the forces according to things like gravity. It’s not more correct to work from an inertial frame, but it’s arguably more intellectually satisfying.
What gets really murky is the fact that well… the distinction we’re making between “fictitious” and “real” forces is not as clear cut as we might think. u/rantonels explained it much better than I can, but the gist is that any force we observe in nature can be argued as “fictitious” when a suitable change of coordinates - similar going from a rotating to non-rotating frame - is made. This, however, is a level of abstraction we tend to avoid in everyday language because historically, which forces are fictitious was clear cut. It wasn’t until the refinement of classical field theory and general relativity, which are (relatively) “modern” and very advanced theories, that this really became problematic.
Overall, though, if we’re looking at the world from a Newtonian perspective, using an inertial frame makes sense, so the Earth is clearly rotating, and the common language is poorly chosen.
And by golly, even after learning everything we have learned, the sun still Rises in the East every morning.
Well no, that’s not what I mean. We both aren’t getting by in this world either. Not having a self tends to lead to negative consequences since there isn’t other people. There also wouldn’t be likes or dislikes either. We all operate as if there is a self, can’t really get by without it.
That’s a bit different then all the holes I mentioned about sensory experience that we didn’t know before. If everyone did I don’t think it would be good.
It’s the same with time, we all believe time to exist and the flow forward but time might not even exist:
Here too: https://www.facebook.com/groups/physicsisfun109/posts/439121938766656/
There is something worth discussing here. The world is not in great shape. We are creating more than one catastrophe for ourselves. You could say that’s because we see ourselves differently than we did a few centuries ago.
But how do you go backwards? In our conversations, you go back and forth between what people believe and what can be demonstrated as true. If we can’t demonstrate this thing we call self exists, like physically exists, then we have to deal with that.
This is the nonsense comes from not recognizing the difference between your thoughts and the physical reality you live within.
Arguing about whether your physical body has a self, or if time exists or not, simply leads to the kind of dead end you seem to be experiencing.
Those silly arguments about time are about mathematics, and not about the reality of the physical material matrix we exist within.
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Well like I said, the stuff about time isn’t what we knew then either.
Just more evidence to highlight things we didn’t know before:
Our bodies are a collection of cells that continually die, reproduce and continue the process over a lifetime. We are never the same person we were the day, week, month, year before. We start over by the second but we do not perceive these changes. What we see is how our bodies change without reversals and in clumps: infant, child, teen, adult, middle age, old age. We mark “time” in years and age, while our bodies mark time in seconds and in new beginnings. These are biological and psychological time keepers, keeping us blinded, confused and/or protected from our realities.