Philosophy Discussion Forums

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 4:50 am GaryLouisSmith wrote:

In other words, it isn't a matter of interpretation, it a matter of direct vision.

I don't know how you can tell the difference between that and gothic ghost stories.

Why do you think there is a difference?

GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 4:59 am

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 4:50 am GaryLouisSmith wrote:



I don't know how you can tell the difference between that and gothic ghost stories.

Why do you think there is a difference?

Gothic ghost stories were written to entertain readers and listeners and allow us to escape from mundane lives.My favourite one is MR James 'Whistle and I'll Come to You'. The themes include fascination with found ancient artefacts, and purposeless malevolence. I suppose MR James well knew those themes tap into archetypal feelings.

How do myths about gods compare?

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 5:40 am

GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 4:59 am

Why do you think there is a difference?

Gothic ghost stories were written to entertain readers and listeners and allow us to escape from mundane lives.My favourite one is MR James 'Whistle and I'll Come to You'. The themes include fascination with found ancient artefacts, and purposeless malevolence. I suppose MR James well knew those themes tap into archetypal feelings.

How do myths about gods compare?

Almost all Gothic tales and fold tales in general are grounded in old religions. Even in Nepal, stories transmogrify into popular tales. Nonetheless, there is a basis for all of them in religion. Now if you want to say that religion is just nothing, go ahead. That changes nothing. My knowledge of visions of the gods comes mainly from talking to Buddhist monks and Hindu mystics. You can believe what they say or you can dismiss it. Is it important to you that these stories are just stories and nothing more?

I was reared and educated as a Protestant and puritan regarding feelings interfering with intellectual understanding of religion so all this is difficult for me. I suppose the RCs and the Pagans are better at the Gothic tales element in Christian religious experience. Isn't the Christian God, including the RC one, to be understood intellectually or not at all?

"Nothing more" ! What is there more than stories we tell ourselves? Sure, I'd like there to be more than psychology, but if there is a God he would not want me to be gullible. There is a lot of nonsense and lies and religion is often used for social control.

So we see that religion is like art, is in fact a branch of art, until the social controllers get their hands on it. The social controllers and the money people get their hands on art too.
I've been told mysticism is at liberal end of the authoritarian-liberal parameter of religions. So I'd believe the mystics. I also believe artists who are avant garde if their work a) gives rise to new ideas b) is ethical. It has to be ethical otherwise you get Nazi art and pornography.

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 6:28 am I was reared and educated as a Protestant and puritan regarding feelings interfering with intellectual understanding of religion so all this is difficult for me. I suppose the RCs and the Pagans are better at the Gothic tales element in Christian religious experience. Isn't the Christian God, including the RC one, to be understood intellectually or not at all?

"Nothing more" ! What is there more than stories we tell ourselves? Sure, I'd like there to be more than psychology, but if there is a God he would not want me to be gullible. There is a lot of nonsense and lies and religion is often used for social control.

So we see that religion is like art, is in fact a branch of art, until the social controllers get their hands on it. The social controllers and the money people get their hands on art too.
I've been told mysticism is at liberal end of the authoritarian-liberal parameter of religions. So I'd believe the mystics. I also believe artists who are avant garde if their work a) gives rise to new ideas b) is ethical. It has to be ethical otherwise you get Nazi art and pornography.

I'm not the person you should be talking to because I'm the guy who thinks you philosophical materialism is wrong. I think your intellectual understanding of existence is cracked.

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 6:28 am I was reared and educated as a Protestant and puritan regarding feelings interfering with intellectual understanding of religion so all this is difficult for me. I suppose the RCs and the Pagans are better at the Gothic tales element in Christian religious experience. Isn't the Christian God, including the RC one, to be understood intellectually or not at all?

"Nothing more" ! What is there more than stories we tell ourselves? Sure, I'd like there to be more than psychology, but if there is a God he would not want me to be gullible. There is a lot of nonsense and lies and religion is often used for social control.

So we see that religion is like art, is in fact a branch of art, until the social controllers get their hands on it. The social controllers and the money people get their hands on art too.
I've been told mysticism is at liberal end of the authoritarian-liberal parameter of religions. So I'd believe the mystics. I also believe artists who are avant garde if their work a) gives rise to new ideas b) is ethical. It has to be ethical otherwise you get Nazi art and pornography.

You seem to think that if you think calmly and rationally with all your best sensibilities that you can give a fairly decent account of the world. I say you can't. Every attempt you make will be even more glaringly wrong. Words will fail you. Then what will you do. I say that if you go into your room, forget the world and let words play any which way they want, that you will then find yourself writing Truth.

GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 8:23 am

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 6:28 am I was reared and educated as a Protestant and puritan regarding feelings interfering with intellectual understanding of religion so all this is difficult for me. I suppose the RCs and the Pagans are better at the Gothic tales element in Christian religious experience. Isn't the Christian God, including the RC one, to be understood intellectually or not at all?

"Nothing more" ! What is there more than stories we tell ourselves? Sure, I'd like there to be more than psychology, but if there is a God he would not want me to be gullible. There is a lot of nonsense and lies and religion is often used for social control.

So we see that religion is like art, is in fact a branch of art, until the social controllers get their hands on it. The social controllers and the money people get their hands on art too.
I've been told mysticism is at liberal end of the authoritarian-liberal parameter of religions. So I'd believe the mystics. I also believe artists who are avant garde if their work a) gives rise to new ideas b) is ethical. It has to be ethical otherwise you get Nazi art and pornography.

You seem to think that if you think calmly and rationally with all your best sensibilities that you can give a fairly decent account of the world. I say you can't. Every attempt you make will be even more glaringly wrong. Words will fail you. Then what will you do. I say that if you go into your room, forget the world and let words play any which way they want, that you will then find yourself writing Truth.

What is it with the clowns on this Forum?
Imagination is truth? REALLY?
war is peace
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength
Black is white

Belindi wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 6:28 am I also believe artists who are avant garde if their work a) gives rise to new ideas b) is ethical. It has to be ethical otherwise you get Nazi art and pornography.

Some of that "Nazi art" is way better than the total crap they come with these days.

GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 8:23 am I say that if you go into your room, forget the world and let words play any which way they want, that you will then find yourself writing Truth.

Not in the least. But it is a way to perform a verbal Rorschach test on yourself; usually what you find is not truth but aberration of which this entire thread is a near facsimile.

Carl Jung devoted much time to the study of the archetypal forms of which Gary has spoken. He called them "archetypes of the collective unconscious," structures of the human psyche that are not the product of individual human experience alone but which are common to all mankind. Thus we see the same existential themes (love, birth, death, etc.) acted out in the mythologies of various cultures all over the world. Call it a collective mental/psychic filter, but Gary refuses to acknowledge mental filters, so he takes what he sees at face value.

When I was a teenager in the 1969 I "accidentally" took a very high dose of orange sunshine, a.k.a., lysergic something-or-other, whereupon I was given the utterly terrifying and life-changing gift of watching all of my unconscious mental filters crumble, spiriting me away from 3D reality into a dimension of pure consciousness where I was a pinpoint of awareness in a seemingly infinite ocean of conscious energy. Returning from that state, I observed all of my habitual mental filters going up again and got some sense of the function they served, which, as far as I could tell, was primarily physical survival based. I felt like a magical genie being confined to a bottle....

Jklint wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 3:50 pm

GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 8:23 am I say that if you go into your room, forget the world and let words play any which way they want, that you will then find yourself writing Truth.

Not in the least. But it is a way to perform a verbal Rorschach test on yourself; usually what you find is not truth but aberration of which this entire thread is a near facsimile.

Don’t forget that she calls herself a materialist (a silly non-philosophy). She believes that “mind” is just the physiology of the brain. The only thing she “knows” is what’s inside her brain, which supposedly receives data from “outside” and molds it into a world. There is no way a materialist can get outside her brain and look at reality. Only shadows and speculation are left. So what to do? She could just sit alone in that little room and twiddle her thumbs. Or she could use words to build a magical, ideal world up out of her skull into the Void. Why not? Soon entropy will turn that brain to mush and then who cares?

Most so-called materialists aren’t really true to materialism. They do believe that they can see the real world outside the mind. They really do believe in minds. But I take them at their word. Reality is beyond their reach. They must speculate and dream. Words are all they have. And they are next to nothing.

Felix wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 4:09 pm Carl Jung devoted much time to the study of the archetypal forms of which Gary has spoken. He called them "archetypes of the collective unconscious," structures of the human psyche that are not the product of individual human experience alone but which are common to all mankind. Thus we see the same existential themes (love, birth, death, etc.) acted out in the mythologies of various cultures all over the world. Call it a collective mental/psychic filter, but Gary refuses to acknowledge mental filters, so he takes what he sees at face value.

When I was a teenager in the 1969 I "accidentally" took a very high dose of orange sunshine, a.k.a., lysergic something-or-other, whereupon I was given the utterly terrifying and life-changing gift of watching all of my unconscious mental filters crumble, spiriting me away from 3D reality into a dimension of pure consciousness where I was a pinpoint of awareness in a seemingly infinite ocean of conscious energy. Returning from that state, I observed all of my habitual mental filters going up again and got some sense of the function they served, which, as far as I could tell, was primarily physical survival based. I felt like a magical genie being confined to a bottle....

I never think of Platonic Forms as Jungian archetypes, though they may very well be. I really don't know that much about Carl Jung. If you want to know what I think are the Forms, go into a natural history museum. You will see all types of natural objects laid out according to categorical type and sub-type and sub-sub-type. In biology it is kingdom, phyla and species. Minerals are categorized as are tools and cultural things. Everything is labelled and well-organized. Those hierarchical forms are the Platonic Forms.

Are those forms real or are they man-made? Is reality really categorized according to type and form? I say Yes and we can see what those forms are. It is popular today to think all that labeling is just a human thing. People want to see nature as fluid and ever changing, dynamic, not like things are in a stuffy museum where everything is dead. So are those labels and forms just filters we put on when we look at the world? Or are they really there? I say they are really there.

GaryLouisSmith: If you want to know what I think are the Forms, go into a natural history museum. You will see all types of natural objects laid out according to categorical type and sub-type and sub-sub-type. In biology it is kingdom, phyla and species. Minerals are categorized as are tools and cultural things. Everything is labelled and well-organized. Those hierarchical forms are the Platonic Forms.

Those sorts of mental conceptions are culture specific, they are not universal archetypes, like the myths and legends of virgin birth, divine incarnations, death and resurrection, judgement days, et. al., seen in all of the great traditions. If you place every mental knick-knack in the collective unconscious bin, it becomes a psychic waste-basket. If everything is a Platonic form, than nothing is.

GaryLouisSmith: Are those forms real or are they man-made?

Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell (the two reached identical conclusions) would say they are real in the sense that they are genuine reflections of the structure and order of the human psyche. You have turned these archetypes into historical artifacts. That is the cognitive error of the religious fundamentalist.

GaryLouisSmith: So are those labels and forms just filters we put on when we look at the world?

Some are and some aren't. As I replied to you in an earlier post, it's "all or nothing" with you, too much nuance makes you nauseous, everything you've said has confirmed this opinion.

GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 6:32 pmDon’t forget that she calls herself a materialist (a silly non-philosophy)…

"Physical realism, or materialism, is the doctrine that the whole of what exists is constituted of matter and its local motions, not Aristotelian 'prime matter' but physical matter, and is hence 'physical' in the literal sense that all its constituents are among the subject matter of physics. Every entity—stone or man, idea or essence—is on this principle a vulnerable and effective denizen of the one continuum of action, and in the entire universe, including the knowing mind itself, there is nothing which could not be destroyed (or repaired) by a spatiotemporal redisposition of its components."
(pp. 212-3)

"As soon as physical realism is set forth with some degree of precision and polish, the same detractors who once charged it with being an odious grotesquerie are ready to charge it with being an obvious truism, having no intelligible alternative. On the contrary, the statement of materialism thus clarified not only means something; it means something distinctive, arresting, illuminating, a thesis so far from empty and obvious that, unfortunately, it has been expressly denied by a great majority of philosophers and philosophasters. It has seldom been wholly without adherents; it is the philosophy taken for granted by a good many educated men, including especially those engineers and scientists who have not been corrupted by mysticism or phenomenalism; but most of the populace of Christendom, and most metaphysicians dignified with livings, lay or ecclesiastical, have emphatically refused to admit that everything in the universe can be ruined or repaired by local rearrangement. They have believed in enormous amounts of nonphysical, nonspatial, and even nontemporal reality, beyond the corruption of moth and rust, either supplementing material reality or supplanting it: minds, soul, spirits, and ideas, transcendent ideals and eternal objects, numbers, principles, angels, and Pure Being."
(p. 224)

"The ideal aim of systematic knowledge is to disclose the fewest primitive elements into which the most diverse objects are analysable and the fewest primitive facts, singular and general, from which the behavior of things is deducible. Metaphysics is the most scientific of the sciences because it tries the hardest to explain every kind of fact by one simple principle or simple set of principles. It is the most empirical of sciences because, by the same token, a metaphysics is directly relevant to and confirmable or falsifiable by every item of every experience, whereas every other science is explicitly concerned with only a few select and abstract aspects of some experiences. Physical realism is the ideal metaphysics, the veritable paragon of philosophy, because its category of spatiotemporal pattern best permits analysis of diverse complexity to uniform and ordered simplicities, is most thoroughly numerable, and so most exactly and systematically calculable. Socratic purposes, Platonic ideals, Aristotelian qualities, Plotinian hierarchies—these are surds in comparison with a system of nature limned in patterns of actions in the ordered dimensions of a spatiotemporal hypersphere."
(p. 227)

"If the rivals of materialism have any advantage it must be because there are some residual phenomena which they can explain better. Now, most of the phenomena which the supernaturalist throws in the naturalist's teeth are such as the supernaturalist himself has never explained."
(p. 234)

"The candid student, in fine, cannot be blamed if he concludes that the only reason that physical realism seems vulnerable at all is that it explains so much more so much better than other philosophies that the imperfections of its explanations are noticeable. As solipsism gains undeserved credit by being so preposterous that its bare possibility looks like evidence in its favor, so materialism suffers by having so few difficulties that one difficulty more or less makes a difference. A blasé public does not expect idealisms and dualisms to explain anything. With innocent cynicism, we appreciate that these philosophies were designed for a different purpose and are doing all that can be expected in a logical way if they avoid contradicting themselves and the obvious facts of experience. The physical realist seems constantly riding for a fall because he is on the only horse really entered in the chase.

It is most excellent testimony to the high confirmedness of physical realism that so many of its competitors renounce confirmation as a criterion. It is a tribute to its power of explaining the appearances that its competitors call it a philosophy of appearances (for we have seen that it is not a philosophy of appearances in any other sense), and that the persons who hate it are preeminently the persons who hate understanding, the mystery lovers. It is a tribute to the scientific advantage of materialism that the application of scientific method in philosophy is so often decried as a begging of the question in its favor and that materialism is called a presupposition of scientific method or scientific method is alleged to be limited to material reality. The logic of science has in sooth no presuppositions and no limitations. It is analytic and a priori, like 'Eggs are eggs', and inexorably germane to any possible world, monistic or dualistic, theistic or atheistic, chaos or cosmos. The hand-in-glove conformity of physical realism and scientific method is no logically preestablished harmony but the empirical fit of a beautifully concordant hypothesis with the facts.

Physical realism is not a foregone conclusion, but it is so lucid and probable that to defend it is, in this day, to defend integrity and understanding. To be loyal to it is to be loyal to philosophy, as to be loyal to philosophy is to be loyal to knowledge and to life. Materialism has often been patronized as a naive and childish philosophy, and this judgment of it is less unjust than most. Materialism is the philosophy of the preschool child as of a pre-Socratic and pre-Sophistic culture. It is the philosophy of limpid minds concerned only to know what most likely is actually the case, not yet distraught by the desire to turn ideation to the uses of compensation, obfuscation, or denial.

For us in America today the contrast between the high-hearted metaphysics of naturalism and all the fine evasions of obscurantism and agnosticism may be literally of epochal importance. The culture of America, by reason of its unique provenance, may choose either to be old or to be young, to be Alexandrian or to be Milesian. Whether we are thus at the end of a career or the beginning or one will in large part depend upon whether our citizens in this century learn their lessons from mystic evangels who would purge us of scientific understanding, from resigned sophisticates who set up languages and toy with thoughts of future possible sensations, or from philosophers who explore the nature of things."
(pp. 237-8)

(Williams, Donald Cary. "Naturalism and the Nature of Things." 1944. In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 212-238. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966.)

Felix wrote: ↑September 5th, 2019, 8:53 pm

GaryLouisSmith: So are those labels and forms just filters we put on when we look at the world?

Some are and some aren't. As I replied to you in an earlier post, it's "all or nothing" with you, too much nuance makes you nauseous, everything you've said has confirmed this opinion.

According to David Lewis, there's a spectrum of classes/sets of things defined in terms of their degree of naturalness, with perfectly natural classes/sets and totally unnatural ones being the poles. A class's/set's degree of naturalness is determined by the degree of objective resemblance or similarity between its members, with qualitative identity (indistinguishability) being the maximum degree. For example, the class/set of electrons is perfectly natural because all electrons are qualitatively identical, all of them being perfect duplicates of one another. And the class/set of things which are either three-legged dogs, refrigerators, or painters disliked by Picasso is extremely unnatural. But note that "unnatural" doesn't mean "unreal"! For if abstract classes/sets exist at all, the extremely or totally unnatural ones are as real as the perfectly natural ones.