Bacon's idols that impact us today

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AI: Francis Bacon’s “Idols of the Mind” are four categories of intellectual fallacies or cognitive biases outlined in his 1620 work, *[Novum Organum]

AF These idols—Tribe, Cave, Marketplace, and Theater—represent distortions in human understanding, prejudice, and language that hinder scientific inquiry and objective truth, requiring correction through empirical observation.

Idols of the Tribe (Idola tribus):** False notions inherent in human nature itself. This includes the tendency to see more order in the world than exists, to trust sensory impressions, and to believe things that match our desires.

Idols of the Cave (Idola specus):** Errors arising from an individual’s unique background, education, personality, and experiences
.
Idols of the Marketplace (Idola fori):** Misunderstandings caused by the improper use of language, words, and social communication.

Idols of the Theater (Idola theatri):** Distortions resulting from dogmatic, outdated, or false philosophical systems and scientific methods.

Bacon aimed to expose these “idols” (fixations) to clear the path for a new, inductive approach to knowledge.

K: and around ILP, we see this ‘‘idols’’ every single day… the practice
of Philosophy, such as it is, is degraded by the fixation on these idols…
and until we begin to first, see them as they are, and secondly,
work on fixing them, we won’t see very good philosophy practiced
around here…

and we begin with understanding the idol of the tribe…
false notions inherent in human nature itself…which includes
the tendency to see more order in the world than exists, and to
believe things that match our desires…

We see this last one all the time… reality is skewered by
our believing things that match our desires… our own bigotry
and prejudice leads us to holding beliefs that don’t exists within
reality… for example, the sheer hatred the right has for cities,
urban centers…they may as well call cities "dens of inequity’’
and why this hatred? basically urban centers are where minorities
live… and the right’s hatred of blacks and minorities lead them to
hate urban centers… IQ45 hatred of urban centers is almost
legendary… and the right follows that hatred…this is an example
of the right believing things that match their desires/hatred…

The second aspect is this seeing more order than actually exists…
we live in a random universe that has chance and probability
at it’s center… it is human nature to hold that we seek order
and unity within the universe… part of the human problem today,
is that we don’t understand that we live in a disorganized,
no god universe, and its very nature is randomness
and chance… the process that brings about change in
the universe is entropy… an example of this is aging…
that is the very process of entropy at work in the human body…
and in my body, one day entropy will win the battle and the result
will be my death… as it brings about the death of every life form…
if you don’t have entropy as part of your viewpoint or vision of the
universe, then you have a wrong understanding of what
it means to be human…

we shall pick up the other idols, as I go along…

Kropotkin

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My “Burning Bush-like” encounter with God
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the next idol we approach is the idol of the cave… Errors arising
from an individual’s unique background, education, personality,
and experiences…We can best see this through the thought
of MR. A… his prior experiences has left him hating capitalism
and the ‘‘American way of life’’…I too was homeless but I
didn’t turn to hate the way MR. A has…

I was born in 1959, and my childhood idols were far different
than those who were born say, 2000… we live in a far different
world… we can find our childhood indoctrinations here…the hatred
of anything, ‘‘not American’’ is the America I grew up in… the
pluralism and diversity that exists today, was not present in my
youth… but my experiences also includes being born in wealth,
living in poverty, being homeless and today, being retired…
So, which experience should I count on to decide my own
philosophies?

What I have said, and I shall say it again, is that
we are born within a specific set of indoctrinations
and training… or said another way, what sort of
brainwashing did you grow up with?

and by the means of education, we can learn, well most of the time,
how we can overcome that set of indoctrinations/brainwashing…
That was part of the mission of Nietzsche, to show us how to
overcome our childhood indoctrinations/brainwashing…
so, how do/did you overcome your childhood indoctrinations/
brainwashing? But we can see from the responses around ILP,
that many, if not most of the people around ILP, were not able
to overcome their childhood indoctrinations… their brainwashing…
the belief in god is one such example of not being able to
overcome one’s childhood beliefs…
and what are other beliefs that we seem to be unable to
overcome in our modern day society?

Kropotkin

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the next idol we approach is the idol of the Marketplace…
Misunderstandings caused by the improper use of language,
words, and social communication…

and we see this all the time, not only in philosophy,
but in life…I argue for this and another argues for that,
and if we were to actually understand the ground of the other,
we would see that quite often, not always, but often that
we are actually arguing for the same things, we are just
using different words to say the same thing… a common enough
error we see every day… this idol comes from a failure
to define and understand our terms and the terms of other
speakers…

Kropotkin

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and the final idol… is the one that is plaguing America today…
the idol of the Theater… distortions resulting from dogmatic,
outdated or false philosophical systems and scientific
method…

The entire MAGA belief stems from a false understanding that
somehow, in some unstated fashion, that America is no longer
great… which leaves several things to work out…first of all,
how are we to judge this allege failure to greatness?
What criteria are we using to judge America’s greatness or lack
therein? I would argue that the very ‘‘symptoms’’ of our lack of
greatness is not a lack of greatness at all… one has argued,
as MAGA has argued, that because America is no longer respected,
we are no longer great… but that is a lie on several fronts…
greatness does not depend on the beliefs of others…
I would argue that greatness does not depend on the words of
others… because that would mean that our value is determined
by the words of others… I am a very good philosopher, but I don’t
the words of others to confirm my ability… I am secure in the notion
that I am a very good philosopher… the words of others doesn’t
change that fact… just as the words of others doesn’t change
the position of how great or not great America is…

However, I would argue that our greatness or lack therein, doesn’t
lie in the position that MAGA proclaims to be our greatness…
in other words, it isn’t our military might or our economic might,
that makes us great… our greatness, such as it is, stems from
our moral leadership… that America was considered to be,
the most moral/ethical nation on earth… that was our greatness…
that we held moral leadership of the world…not economics or
military, but morals/ethics that we were considered to be the
‘‘greatest nation on earth’’…

And America’s greatness was confirmed by the moral/ethical
leadership of such presidents as Jimmy Carter, Clinton,
Obama, and Biden… we lost our greatness in our loss
of our moral and ethical leadership… and that began with
Nixon, and continued with both Bushes… and of course,
IQ45 is the most immoral president in American history…
there is where we lost our greatness… not in the economic
or military power we had, but in our moral leadership…
to make America great again, we must return to the moral
and ethical leadership given by previous presidents like
Obama and Biden… you want to have MAGA… then it lies
in becoming the moral and ethical leaders of the world…

Kropotkin

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Yes, by all means, to make America great again, we must return to the “moral” and “ethical” leadership of past administrations who, according to AI Overview (some bolding and the [bracketed interjection] mine)…

AI Overview:

…both the Obama and Biden administrations supplied substantial weaponry to Israel that was subsequently used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) [to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children] in military campaigns in Gaza.

So, yes!…YES!, my dear Kropotkin, the great morality of America is the envy of the world and is what other nations should aspire to emulate…

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Peter it’s very hard to read you sometimes, lf only you could categorise more and use headings in bold font etc.

My 2 cents: “Idols of the Tribe” seems to me to be 2 things - Crowd Symbols (neutral) & National Psychoses (very bad):

Crowd Symbols (as per Robert Kaplan in his “Balkan Ghosts” which I strongly recommend you avoid, it is anti-Turkish hate literature, check the negative reviews on Goodreads) - he brings up Bulgarian Nobel laureate Canetti’s psychological theory of nations based on “Crowd Symbols”, quote:

“For example, Canetti said the crowd symbol for the English is the "sea . . . The Englishman’s disasters have been experienced at sea. . . . His life at home is complementary to life at sea; security and monotony are its essential characteristics. …” For the Germans, the crowd symbol is the “marching forest.” For the French, it is "their revolution." For the Jews, it is “the Exodus from Egypt. . . . The image of this multitude moving year after year through the desert has become the crowd symbol of the Jews.”*

Kaplan then adds his own Crowd Symbols for the Balkan nations, For the Croats it’s the Church. For the Serbs: medieval monasteries, & Kosovo Polje, the “Field of Black Birds,” where the Turks delivered the final defeat to the Serbs on June 28, 1389. For Romanians: The home, the family seated around the humble table with food on it, that is the Romanian crowd symbol. "We are a people whose hatreds, when they are analyzed, can be reduced to the fear of an empty stomach. The utmost pride of a Romanian during the Ceausescu years was to provide food for his family table.

National Psychoses: Dostoeivsky treats of this in Crime & Punishment despite in the same breath forwarding a Russian anti-Ottoman national psychosis. In fact, across the Balkans there’s an anti-Ottoman natoinal psychosis whereby the Ottomans were the Worst. Thing. Ever. Which is utter nonsense, those rustics never had it so good as under Ottoman rule, and what followed after - the nationalistic civil wars, the World Wars & Communism, were immeasurably worse. Yet still, they intone “The Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman slavery”. A Bulgarian lady even told me the Ottomans forced Bulgarians to make their church entrances lowwww in order to humiliate them. In fact a low entrance is a common mediaeval feature, both to enforce piety (bowing while entering) and to give security (difficult to enter to loot, difficult to leave with said loot),.

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seeds:
Yes, by all means, to make America great again, we must return to the “moral” and “ethical” leadership of past administrations who, according to AI Overview (some bolding and the [bracketed interjection] mine)…

AI Overview: both the Obama and Biden administrations supplied substantial weaponry to Israel that was subsequently used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) [to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children] in military campaigns in Gaza.

K: October 7, 2023…

I recall once a right wing hit piece on Obama… in which it attacked
Obama for failing to protect us as President during the 9/11 attack…
of course, failing to mention that Obama wasn’t president during 9/11…
Obama was in fact a law professor, an attorney and an Illinois state
senator at the time…and in Chicago at the time…but hay, when
making an attack piece, never let actual facts get in the way of
your hit piece…

secondly, every single president since Eisenhour, has given
Israel weapons… so, under your theory, every single president
since Eisenhour is also guilty of this lack of morals…
you may want to rethink your hit piece to include actual facts,
like when was Obama president?

Kropotkin

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You seem to not understand what the bolded part in the following line means:

“…supplied substantial weaponry to Israel that was subsequently used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) [to slaughter tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children]…”

And is it possible that the right-wing attack piece on Obama you are referring to came from this clueless Trump supporter…

…of which I, myself, referred to many times over on the PN forum?

Kropotkin wrote:

secondly, every single president since Eisenhour, has given
Israel weapons… so, under your theory, every single president
since Eisenhour is also guilty of this lack of morals…

Precisely!

Indeed, anyone with at least two working brain cells could have (should have) inferred that from what I wrote.

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Now that’s my kind of salad. Maybe add a few slices of tomato slathered in mayo (plus an extra dose of my cholesterol medication) and I’m good to go. :winking_face_with_tongue:

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Mr, Ross, you aksed a question over at PN but I can’t get in so I’ma answer it hurr.

“Why would the God of the Bible want to prevent evil after openly stating that it is He who created it…”

Of course, ‘he’ didn’t create anything because ‘he’ doesn’t exist. That idea exists because it is logically necessary… a necessary feature of a single creator god who has created everything.

Much later, when the religion gets into the hands of the philosophers, scholars, and church clergy to be further developed, the necessity of evil will be used as an excuse for the people needing the church as a mediator, as a teacher and protector who morally informs the people… what to do and what not to do (like sack the church and throw the kings and priests in jail).

By setting up… or i should say ‘keeping’ that original part of the myth… both evil is excused (it’s necessary so we can use our freewill) and described and defined by those who have ideological control over the people. The things you are told not to do are the things that put social order (the wage-slave nuclear family) and the power of the bourgeoisie in jeopardy (murder, stealing, coveting, etc.) The things you are told to do keeps the factory belt running smoothly so the bourgeoisie can continue amassing wealth.

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What is it about certain people who are convinced that just because they themselves have never had any experience during their short little time on Earth that would lead them to believe that God exists,…

…that it therefore means that no one else on the planet could have had such an experience?

Am I supposed to ignore and forget about everything I described happened to me in 1969 -1970 of which I chronicled in my OP post titled: My “Burning Bush-like” encounter with God at the following link to the recently re-opened PN forum…

My "Burning Bush-like" encounter with God. - Philosophy Now Forum

…simply because you…

(my sleepwalking little homeboy / poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

…personally haven’t experienced any reason to believe in something other than the ridiculous notion of “chance” being responsible for the unfathomable order of the universe?

And btw, even though I (for the sake of convenience) did indeed use the word He in the quote you responded to, you are quite correct to use quotation marks around the word ‘he’ - for just like our own eternal souls, God’s soul is genderless, of which I tried to make clear in yet another one of my crazy illustrations…

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“Am I supposed to ignore and forget about everything I described that happened to me”

That’s the problem we’re all faced with. It may be true that someone experienced ‘god’… but nobody should be expected to believe them. Then say they experienced ‘god’ too. This puts them with the other guy, and nobody should be expected to believe them either.

It’s a peculiar position a person is put into by ‘god’ (hypothetically, obviously).

I, personally, would believe nobody has experienced ‘god’ and that their alleged experience has a natural explanation. Additionally, i am confident that if a ‘god’ did exist, it would be making efforts to reveal itself to me… not some homeless guy in a new york alley or a rich evangelist on TV (not saying you’re either).

But it’s difficult to be critical of people claiming to have had supernatural and/or divine experiences without insulting them, so I leave it alone. You can get a feel for what i mean by imagining yourself being surrounded by chimpanzees, all claiming to have met ‘god’. You’re thinking no ‘god’ would bother itself with chimpanzees… and if you told the chimps that, they’d be offended.

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Even though I have brought this to your attention in the past, you have yet to show me that you have the slightest clue as to what my overall theory entails, yet you seem absolutely certain that it must be implausible.

The point is that you need to address and deal with (refute) the message and not try to belittle the messenger whom you recently called a “fraud” because, according to you…

One can’t possibly believe the crap he [seeds] believes at his age without being a fraud or a sophist.

So, once again I ask you - what exactly is it that you think I believe?

Stop avoiding that question.

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@Peter_Kropotkin

You probably weren’t homeless almost fifteen years straight like I was which was like an open air prison sentence for the crime of myself simply being poor. Yeah, I absolutely despise this nation for that life experience, that was fifteen years of my life robbed from me that I will never ever get back.

Speaking of idols, the liberal idols of equality and freedom. There, I added some for you on the subject of idolatry.

:clown_face:

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MrAuthoritarian:
You probably weren’t homeless almost fifteen years straight like I was which was like an open air prison sentence for the crime of myself simply being poor. Yeah, I absolutely despise this nation for that life experience, that was fifteen years of my life robbed from me that I will never ever get back.

K: I find this interesting; it sounds like you blame the nation:
‘’ I absolutely despise this nation for that life experience’’
and yet, I don’t see any personal accountability for being
homeless… I was homeless and I do take responsibility for
some of that… I didn’t have any skills of any kind to make
any money… and that lies with me… today, I still don’t have
any skills to make any money… but I am now retired, so it doesn’t matter…

if one is homeless for a year or so, one could easily blame the state/
society as you do, but any longer and it becomes a choice…
and you should take responsibility for your choices… as I did…
so, are you going to be blaming everyone for your being
homeless or are you going to take some responsibility for
being homeless?

Kropotkin

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@Peter_Kropotkin

You’re insane and deranged.

:clown_face:

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MrAuthoritarian:
You’re insane and deranged.

K: quite an overreaction to my post…
wonder what nerve I hit? So, no, you are not going to
take any responsibility for being homeless? I am not surprise…
conservatives don’t take responsibility for anything…

Kropotkin

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@Peter_Kropotkin

"Have the starving masses taken personal responsibility for their collective starvation, squalor, or misery? It’s not the responsibility of society to care for them, truly they must of brought it on themselves within this liberal free society of ours. It’s the only explanation. " - Peter Kropotkin

Typical boomer takes, almost fucking cliche at this rate. sighs

:clown_face: