Materialism Matters

A short disclaimer before we read further: I’m a materialist. Materialism is a branch of philosophy to which the sciences, particularly the physical and life sciences, owe a lot. Materialism posits that the material world — matter — exists, and everything in the Universe, including consciousness, is made from or is a product of matter. An objective reality exists and we can understand it. Without materialism, physics, chemistry, and biology as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Another branch of philosophy, idealism, is in direct contradiction to materialism. Idealism states that, instead of matter, the mind and consciousness are fundamental to reality; that they are immaterial and therefore independent of the material world.

A lot of scientists and researchers don’t necessarily have a conscious philosophy, or else don’t consider philosophy to be particularly relevant to their day-to-day work. But by not having a conscious philosophy, scientists – like anyone else – can unconsciously pick up other philosophies and outlooks in the society around them.   READ MORE...

About Consciousness

The Philosophical Hard Problem
Some say consciousness is mysterious. But there are two ways to think about this. One is that consciousness is mysterious in the way that the idea of a soul that survives death is, and the other is in the way that the mechanism of evolutionary inheritance was before DNA was discovered.


Today, the mystery of consciousness is often discussed in terms of a special quality—the way it feels to be consciousness. This phenomenal feeling is to be what makes red seem red, and fear feel fearful. Unconscious states come with no such feelings. Philosopher Thomas Nagel refers to these feelings as “qualia," and David Chalmers, another philosopher, has argued that qualia constitute the “hard problem” of consciousness.     READ MORE...

Consciousness

Even among non-neuroscientists, determining the origin and purpose of consciousness is widely known as “the hard problem.” Since its coinage by philosopher David Chalmers thirty years ago, that label has worked its way into a variety of contexts; about a decade ago, Tom Stoppard even used it for the title of a play. Unsurprisingly, it’s also referenced in the episode of Big Think’s Dispatches from the Well above, which presents discussions of the nature of consciousness with neuroscientist Christof Koch, Vedanta Society of New York minister Swami Sarvapriyananda, technology entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, Santa Fe Institute Davis Professor of Complexity Melanie Mitchell, and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.

Koch describes consciousness as “what you see, it’s what you hear, it’s the pains you have, the love you have, the fear, the passion.” It is, in other words, “the experience of anything,” and for all their sophistication, our modern inquiries into it descend from René Descartes’ proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Sarvapriyananda, too, makes reference to Descartes in explaining his own conception of consciousness as “the light of lights,” by which “everything here is lit up.”  READ MORE...

A Few Philosophical Concepts

What is the meaning of life? What are good and evil? What is justice? These are some of the questions that philosophers have been asking for centuries. Philosophy is a complex and fascinating field of study that can sometimes seem daunting to beginners. And while there’s no one answer that everyone will agree on, it’s still important to know some of the most fundamental ideas in philosophy. Here are ten common philosophical concepts everyone should be familiar with, regardless of educational background.

Plato's Theory of Ideas
Plato was the first to separate the “world of things” from the “world of ideas.” According to Plato, the idea (eidos) is the source of a thing, its prototype, the underlying reality of any particular object. For example, the “idea of a table” can either coincide with a particular table in reality or not match. But the “idea of the table” and the “concrete table” will continue to exist separately.

A vivid illustration of the division of the world into the world of ideas and the world of objects is the famous Platonic myth of the cave, in which people see not objects and other people but only their shadows on the wall of the cave. In this metaphor, the shadows projected on the wall of the cave correspond to the individual objects in the world, while the objects whose shadows are on the wall correspond to the ideas – which are more fundamental and real, in Plato’s view.

The cave for Plato is an allegory of our world, where people live, believing that the shadows on the walls of the caves are the only way to know reality. However, in reality, the shadows are just an illusion. Still, because of this illusion, it is difficult for people to pose critical questions about the existence of reality and overcome their “false consciousness.”  READ MORE...

Reality of the Mind

One of the stranger articles we’ve seen in a long time at Aeon proposes a war on the very concept of “the mind.”

“The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of them,” Joe Gough, a philosophy student, says.

Here is his reasoning:
"The terms mind and mental are used in so many ways and have such a chequered history that they carry more baggage than meaning. Ideas of the mind and the mental are simultaneously ambiguous and misleading, especially in various important areas of science and medicine. When people talk of ‘the mind’ and ‘the mental’, the no-mind thesis doesn’t deny that they’re talking about something – on the contrary, they’re often talking about too many things at once. Sometimes, when speaking of ‘the mind’, people really mean agency; other times, cognition; still others, consciousness; some uses of ‘mental’ really mean psychiatric; others psychological; others still immaterial; and yet others, something else."   JOE GOUGH, “THE MIND DOES

Joe Gough

Of course, all general terms are like that. Singling out “the mind,” as opposed to “a free press” or “wise financial management,” for special criticism is not clearly reasonable. We can’t just get rid of such terms because people are always reinterpreting them or moving the goalposts. That’s part of the very nature of abstractions. Abstractions are, by their nature, easier to just constantly reinvent than something wholly material like furniture or stonework.

And his recommendations?
"When we see the concepts of mind and mental doing such harm, we have good reason to get rid of them. Rather than talk about ‘minds’ and ‘the mental’, we would be better off discussing the more precise and helpful concepts relevant to what we’re doing. The good news is that they already exist for the most part, and work perfectly well once their connections with mind and mental are broken. Psychology has psychological, cognitive science cognitive, and psychiatry psychiatric. Outside these areas, there are many, many more –consciousness, imagination, responsibility, agency, thought, memory, to name but a few. Feminist work on relational autonomy and the relational self, and historical precursors such as Homer provide promising avenues for developing conceptions of people that don’t call on the notion of mind – notions according to which people are coherent wholes, not because they have some unifying inner core, but because of the way they, their relationships and their environments conjoin." JOE GOUGH, “THE MIND DOES NOT EXIST” AT AEON (AUGUST 30, 2021)

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Babylonian Tablet

TUCKED AWAY in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions.

First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the center with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. 

But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.

Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. 

Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.

Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues.

These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.

It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. 

However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.  READ MORE

Without Sense of Self

In the context of meditation practice, meditators can experience a state of “pure awareness” or “pure consciousness”, in which they perceive consciousness itself. This state can be experienced in various ways, but evidently incorporates specific sensations as well as non-specific accompanying perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.

These are just some of the findings of the most extensive survey of meditators ever conducted on the experience of pure consciousness.

The findings of the survey recently have been published in PLOS ONE. The study was conducted by Professor Thomas Metzinger from the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Dr. Alex Gamma from the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich.

They designed an online questionnaire comprising more than a hundred questions and asked thousands of meditators worldwide to answer it.

“The goal of our research was not to learn more about meditation. We are interested in human consciousness,” said Metzinger. “Our working hypothesis was that pure consciousness is the simplest form of conscious experience. And our goal was to develop a minimal model explanation of human consciousness experience on the basis of this hypothesis.”  READ MORE

Voltaire

 

Am I What I Am or Not?

The French philosopher Descartes once said,  "I THINK THEREFORE I AM." and the world decided that this was proof enough to explain and justify mankind's existence.  However, some later explained that Descartes comments continued with the words that he believes this thinking is always done in the capacity of doubt...  therefore, one could say that proof of existence is in doubt as well...  and we are back to the proverbial first square.

Why do we even care about our own existence in the first place which to me is the first square?

We live...

We die...

and in between the two we accomplish stuff or we do not...  it is just as simple as that.

But, there are those of us who still want to know what we really do not need to know...  and, the concept of philosophy was created...  with each global culture having their own unique and different sets of philosophical beliefs.

There are four major branches of philosophy:

• Metaphysics
• Epistemology
• Axiology
• Logic

But, only three schools of thought:

• Classic
• Religious 
• Modern

Currently, the major educational philosophies are:

1. Existentialism
2. Essentialism
3. Perennialism
4. Progressivism
5. Social Reconstruction
6. Behaviorism
7. Constructivism
8. Conservatism
9. Humanism

So...  where does this actually take us to an understanding of our own existence and the proof that we even exist at all?

Sadly...  it does not take us anywhere other than to explain why we may or may not do what we do...  which revolves around purpose.

Birth is not proof of existence

Life is not proof of existence

Death is not proof of existence

Yet...  we are here nonetheless...  and, for a certain amount of years continue to life until that life is taken away from us by some explained or unexplained methodology...

HOWEVER, no one can explain why we were given life and actually experienced birth in the first place, other than the male sperm fertilizing a female egg.

But, why me?

and not someone else?

and why am I who I am and not another?

and, am I real or a figment of one's imagination?

or, am I simply a computer program operating in a galactic computer system?

and, why are there UFO's?

and, why is there evidence of alien extraterrestrials?

and, why is it recorded that Jesus declared his kingdom to be not of this world?

and, why do I possess a consciousness?

and, is there a cosmic consciousness?

Russian Cosmism

Russian cosmism is a philosophical and cultural movement that emerged in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, and again, at the beginning of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a burst of scientific investigation into interplanetary travel, largely driven by fiction writers such as Jules Verne and Herbert Wells as well as philosophical movements like the Russian cosmism.

Cosmism entailed a broad theory of natural philosophy, combining elements of religion and ethics with a history and philosophy of the origin, evolution, and future existence of the cosmos and humankind. It combined elements from both Eastern and Western philosophic traditions as well as from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Cosmism was one of the influences on Proletkult, and after the October Revolution, the term came to be applied to "...the poetry of such writers as Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov...: emotional paeans to physical labor, machines, and the collective of industrial workers ... organized around the image of the universal 'Proletarian', who strides forth from the earth to conquer planets and stars."  This form of cosmism, along with the writings of Nikolai Fyodorov, was a strong influence on Andrei Platonov.

Many ideas of the Russian cosmists were later developed by those in the transhumanist movement.  Victor Skumin argues that the Culture of Health will play an important role in the creation of a human spiritual society into the Solar System.

The Culture of Health is the basic science about Spiritual Humanity. It studies the perspectives of harmonious development of "Spiritual man" and "Spiritual ethnos" as a conscious creator of the State of Light into the territory of the Solar System" (by Skumin).

Life's Purpose: Do We Exist?

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.  The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among [the study of] the natural". It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika, 'after the Physics ', another of Aristotle's works).

Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions:

• What is there?
• What is it like?

Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

EXISTENCE

Existence as defined by the dictionary is:  the fact or state of living or having objective reality.

Objective reality means that something is actual (so it exists) independent of the mind. For example: while no one is nearby, a meteor crashes into a car, putting it on flames, leaving only a pile of ashes.

But, now does one prove that one exists simply because one perceives that one is living in some sort of reality? like an illusion... like a dream... like a fantasy...

The French philosopher Descartes believed that we exist because: "I think therefore I am."
but Descartes was a devout doubter in everything; in fact, his complete philosophical approach was based upon DOUBTING. So, if one thinks, one thinks in the context of doubt... so one would have to doubt that I AM.

So, this does not really help us much... even though DESCARTES' statement is still used today to prove that we exist.

The Movie THE MATRIX perceived existence in a another manner as if we were all in some illusionary dream world that was controlled by some sort of gigantic super computer and a variety of super program applications.

Without proof of existence... Life's Purpose is rather meaningless... wouldn't you say?