Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Felix]

With Nietzsche there are no allowances; no second chances.

But then no evolution either, because evolution is the process of learning from mistakes.

[Felix]

Are you being wistful and sad at your plight as a human being?

Oh, I gave up on being a human bring years ago - it was a bore.

[Felix]

bring = being - except when it's gone.

[GaryLouisSmith]

Are you being wistful and sad at your plight as a human being?

Oh, I gave up on being a human bring years ago - it was a bore.

What are you now?

[Felix]

Oh, I gave up on being a human bring years ago - it was a bore.

What are you now?

It varies.... there are many wild critters where I live: among the crows, I am a crow, among the wild rabbit, I am a rabbit, among the wild turkeys, I am a turkey, etc. They are all natural philosophers and don't pretend to understand what they do not.

[GaryLouisSmith]

Oh, I gave up on being a human bring years ago - it was a bore.

What are you now?

It varies.... there are many wild critters where I live: among the crows, I am a crow, among the wild rabbit, I am a rabbit, among the wild turkeys, I am a turkey, etc. They are all natural philosophers and don't pretend to understand what they do not.

Would you call yourself a naturalist? I'm not sure what that means, so maybe you could help me out with that.

[Felix]

Well, I meant that I tune into them and share in their experience of the world, I guess that is more mystical than naturalist?

[GaryLouisSmith]

Well, I meant that I tune into them and share in their experience of the world, I guess that is more mystical than naturalist?

It's poetic and mystical and I think better left unexplained. One can only understand that intuitively.

[Karpel Tunnel]

Oh, I gave up on being a human bring years ago - it was a bore.

What are you now?

Well, he sure looks like a sloth.

[Sculptor1]

With Nietszche the eternal recurrence is not about getting the chance to do everything again and again until you get it right.
Neitszche was all about taking responsibility for your actions in a world limited to one life, without god or heaven.
The ER is about the ultimate embrace of responsibility that comes from accepting the consequences, good or bad, of one’s willful action!
And that you should live each day AS IF you have to repeat it endlessly for eternity. It's a lesson about never **** up.

The Hindu idea is all about a second chance. With Nietzsche there are no allowances; no second chances.
ANyone who has spent a significant time with N and his writing gets that from the outset.

How depressing. A wistful happiness in the fading knowledge that you took responsibility and then poof - nothing.

Rubbish. It's a life lived fully and honestly.
Do you want to live forever? An eternity of childish mistakes?

[Sculptor1]

With Nietzsche there are no allowances; no second chances.

But then no evolution either, because evolution is the process of learning from mistakes.

Not at all. Life is all about self improvement. The ER is about taking personal responsibility and doing the best you can at that specific moment.

[Consul]

The multiverse and the parallel universes of Everett are the fading dreams of what physics could have been if the human mind could have been able to see beyond this little confine. It theoretically can't. Physics has reached its limit and is at an end.

I don't think so. But, ironically, the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics ends up with a pure wave-function ontology and a reductive mathematical platonism, which "dephysicalizes" the concrete, material world by reducing it to an abstract mathematical object in an abstract mathematical space (configuration space). So here we have a physical theory telling us that ultimate reality is nonphysical! That's absurd, isn't it?!

"[T]he version of the many-worlds interpretation…with its extravagant ontology consisting of a constant multiplication of every material entity, does not appeal to many partisans of the many-worlds interpretation. Defenders of the many-worlds interpretation tend to dismiss both this approach and the naive one and prefer to speak of a pure wave function ontology[.]

In this ontology, the world is made of a universal wave function and nothing else. There are, in actual fact, no cats, pointers, brains, etc., situated in ordinary three-dimensional space, but only a mathematical object, a complex function defined on an abstract space, containing all the possible configurations of particles and fields in the universe. In the language of Bell, there are no “local beables” in that theory, i.e., things that exist (beables) and that are localized in R^3 [3D space].

It is also important to realize that the ontology of the “pure wave function” many-worlds interpretation is a purely mathematical object: a function defined on a space of “configurations” (of particles and fields), but without any particles or fields being part of the ontology. Indeed, if we put particles and fields, existing in ordinary three-dimensional space, into our ontology, then we get back to the “naive” picture of worlds constantly splitting and multiplying themselves.

But it is very difficult to see how to make sense of this pure wave function ontology, in particular how to relate it to our familiar experience of everyday objects situated in three-dimensional space."

(Bricmont, Jean. Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics. Cham: Springer, 2016. pp. 209-10)

[Sy Borg]

It varies.... there are many wild critters where I live: among the crows, I am a crow, among the wild rabbit, I am a rabbit, among the wild turkeys, I am a turkey, etc. They are all natural philosophers and don't pretend to understand what they do not.

Would you call yourself a naturalist? I'm not sure what that means, so maybe you could help me out with that.

It's a tricky one. As another who likes to "talk to the animals", labels are tricky. We are not "naturalists" because our studies are informal. We are not naturists either (although Felix expressed interest earlier in being naturist activities with Athena from the Green Dimension).

Personally, I'm not even a romanticist when it comes to nature because I see humans and technology as being as much a part of nature as anything else. I suspect that we and our things are the future of nature on Earth, and perhaps that dynamic holds generally. After all, we ourselves start as sweet and charming beings before twisting our psyches to fit the grostesqueries of human society.

I think where Felix and I agree is the sense that humans overestimate the sentience of the non-sentient and underestimate the sentience of the sentient beings around us.

I am reminded of the time my family laughed after giving the dog a bone, and her struggles to find a place to bury it. She walked back and forth from one side of the back yard to the other, maybe twenty or more times. Such repetitive behaviour seems pretty silly until we lose our keys and suddenly we are thinking "I'm sure I've checked here before but maybe I missed it ...".

If an alien with advanced telescopy was watching both behaviours, they would see little difference.

[GaryLouisSmith]

In this ontology, the world is made of a universal wave function and nothing else. There are, in actual fact, no cats, pointers, brains, etc., situated in ordinary three-dimensional space, but only a mathematical object, a complex function defined on an abstract space, containing all the possible configurations of particles and fields in the universe. In the language of Bell, there are no “local beables” in that theory, i.e., things that exist (beables) and that are localized in R^3 [3D space].

It is also important to realize that the ontology of the “pure wave function” many-worlds interpretation is a purely mathematical object: a function defined on a space of “configurations” (of particles and fields), but without any particles or fields being part of the ontology. Indeed, if we put particles and fields, existing in ordinary three-dimensional space, into our ontology, then we get back to the “naive” picture of worlds constantly splitting and multiplying themselves.

But it is very difficult to see how to make sense of this pure wave function ontology, in particular how to relate it to our familiar experience of everyday objects situated in three-dimensional space."[/i]

This is where Reinhardt Grossmann's book The Existence of the World comes in. He said it was Plato who discovered the world, the world of squirrels, cars, poker chips, broken hammers, bad dreams, and on and on. How to go from the things of pure cosmology to the everyday objects of the world. Or from the microverse to the macroverse.

(Bricmont, Jean. Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics. Cham: Springer, 2016. pp. 209-10)

[GaryLouisSmith]

In this ontology, the world is made of a universal wave function and nothing else. There are, in actual fact, no cats, pointers, brains, etc., situated in ordinary three-dimensional space, but only a mathematical object, a complex function defined on an abstract space, containing all the possible configurations of particles and fields in the universe. In the language of Bell, there are no “local beables” in that theory, i.e., things that exist (beables) and that are localized in R^3 [3D space].

It is also important to realize that the ontology of the “pure wave function” many-worlds interpretation is a purely mathematical object: a function defined on a space of “configurations” (of particles and fields), but without any particles or fields being part of the ontology. Indeed, if we put particles and fields, existing in ordinary three-dimensional space, into our ontology, then we get back to the “naive” picture of worlds constantly splitting and multiplying themselves.

But it is very difficult to see how to make sense of this pure wave function ontology, in particular how to relate it to our familiar experience of everyday objects situated in three-dimensional space."[/i]

This is where Reinhardt Grossmann's book The Existence of the World comes in. He said it was Plato who discovered the world, the world of squirrels, cars, poker chips, broken hammers, bad dreams, and on and on. How to go from the things of pure cosmology to the everyday objects of the world. Or from the microverse to the macroverse.

(Bricmont, Jean. Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics. Cham: Springer, 2016. pp. 209-10)

What happened? The words I wrote in response disappeared. I wrote that this is where Reinhardt Grossmann's book The Existence of the World comes in. How to move from cosmology to the everyday world of things. Grossmann said that it was Plato who discovered the world, the world of ordinary things: squirrels, beds, cars, poker chips, torn pants, bad dreams and on and on. How to move from the microverse to the macroverse.