ILPeople seem to think highly of science, but then they also want the non-science, even dressing it up as science. I’m not saying you are dressing it up, but here at the forums, there is theft.
it’s not quite a self-contradiction but the bolded sentence is a meta-cognition. It seems to me one can learn over time how one tends to bias, where working with metacognitions has been effective - or even merely seemed, I mean, if it seems to work for your whole life, it kinda worked - and where one must be on guard for biases (on certain issues, in certain states of mind, etc.) For example, it seems to me some people are better at metacognition than others. Also that one can improve it like other skills.
I just realized that the zen quote is also a universalized metacognition. In fact the whole Zen enterprise would seem to me to partly deal with improving metacognition - as with Buddhism in general. The quote also would seem to hold for all cognition, not simply metacognition. A peer review is metacognition using several minds.
I don’t really understand what that has to do with what I’m posting, can you please elaborate? I’m not sure what you mean by ‘theft’.
That’s a very poignant and well-thought out insight. Thank you for pointing it out.
You’re welcome. Poignant? That’s and interesting reaction. I like it as a reaction, it’s interesting, but perhaps you meant something else.
Also I edited that post a bit perhaps after you got to it. I added a bit about Zen.
Later I may reply.
It certainly does. Finding the self by losing the self, after all. As for peer review, my reckoning is that if all us have particular biases, then by introducing a peer-review, it is likely that biases will be sufficiently cancelled out by other biases in the opposite direction.
But yeah, it’s fun watching these threads drift from one topic to another. I still don’t have much of an answer for what allows us to make meaningful choices while the base of our being is grounded in material phenomena.
I think the whole idea of us being based in material is confused. Not because I am particularly a dualist, but because matter is not like we thought matter was like. Once you view yourself as a material being, looking out into other matter, making choices from the menu of life, the AE answer, it seems to me, seems far fetched. Where is this gap in causation arising that allows a kind of outside the chain subjectivity. The present, pushed by the past, will fall into the next domino.
I have no great well thought out alternative, but I think it is more like the universe itself is creative. It builds and moves towards. In us it is aware - I am a pantheist, but it should be too controversial for most to grant humans awareness - and so we create what comes next out of our reactions to what has happened and what is happening and how these felt, informed by imagination - sometimes - and intuition. (I am setting aside the determinism free will issue.) We are not separate from the creating universe but loci of speed up creation, shall we say, though local. (our local has expanded however). As I say all this I do realize there is something in the AE I experience as ontologically real. Awareness seems to overfill the present. The present is not merely given but tentative and then we move toward something from that tentativeness. Creating it. Take this metaphorically - not as an attempt to prove free will or prove anything - but it does feel a bit like superposition from QM. Poised over a few directions, and then desire goes in one direction. (not utterly freely, but it opens a can of worms if I go into my thoughts around that also).
Sure. It really does seem that as I type this, that I am choosing to do so. It does feel as though I am choosing. But in the end, I just don’t know. I can’t be certain of it.
That wasn’t the part I was focusing on. Not the feeling of choice, but the surplus. There could be a surplus mere witness, but there is a surplus. I wasn’t making a case for free will, just participation in agency.
Please explain further.
How could it not?
By ‘knowing “unknown casual forces”’ I meant people knowing each separate ‘unknown casual force’ as they become aware of them. It’s useless to say there are unknown casual forces in general; worst case you would be implying that there is some ‘world behind the scenes’, best case you would be trying to state the obvious fact that people can alter and progress their knowledge.
Knowing that you’re not dependent on what is unknowable helps avoid confusion and deference and helps one become authentic.
One assumes that ‘casual’ means causal. All ultimate causal forces are unknown. When someone turns on a light, what is the cause? It is the connection allowing a potential difference to complete a circuit, is it the nerve impulses that make the finger move? But then why those? what has caused the potential difference? What caused to nerve impulse? Was it use to the brain reacting to the knowledge of darkness? Then surely the cause of the light going on is the earth revolving into night time? Maybe the cause is the fact that someone paid the electricity bill and so caused the Electricity company to supply the house with the energy. Maybe the cause was THomas Swan the inventor of the light bulb.
In fact there is never any end to causality, right back to the Big Bang and beyond.
So, yeah, causes are basically all unknown. When you compare the tiny understanding and knowledge of the few known causes, the number of unknown causes are massive.
Gay.
One thing, though, both types of existentialisms correspond, or have corresponding features, in respect to the ‘seeking of light’. This is very Platonic, and it is a process again not exclusively tied to either the intellectual, or the sensory perception of reality. It is simply an attempt to escape the darkness. Here it does not matter whether it id a conscious, God inspired and initiated process, or simply the product of unknown causality, since in the deeper sense,there very well may nnot exist a difference between them.
When it is said, 'in th beginning was the word, the word implies both: literal and figurative ramifications.
So God is both: an aspiration, and a product of that. The created creation, or self re-creation makes snese within this reflexive feedback system. It just happens , that we call this ‘God’. It may be ‘gay’ in the scientific nomenclature, as self seeking, but this is a very early process of trying to identify in terms of an aesthetic principle. Kierkegaard places religion and aesthetics very much in coingruence, whereas Sartre
goes out of his way to designate, reify, by bracketing the limits within the realism of morel objectivism. See, Saint Genet, as the moral equivalent. Nothing strange here, only a premordial attempt at justification of principle for a pre-existing situation.
How would we classify something like virtual particles emerging out of an infinitely existing vacuum void or quantum foam or whatever (as allowed by the uncertainty principle)? Terms like universe out of nothing are falling out of favor (newer physics uses terms like “non-particle” space and particle space to try and define a property that apparently eluded definition by earlier generations of physicists), even though theologians haven’t caught up with modern physics (and they’re largely basing their arguments on outdated scientific principles and perspectives).
Existentialism arose in conflict with the prevailing view at the time, which postulated that some sort of sentience must precede our creation, which flowed from Aristotle’s four causes (particularly, his view of “efficient cause”). I think what we’ve learned about biological evolution has long ago dispensed with the idea of efficient cause (in the context of creation); and very decisively, and I would provide the same answer to your question, biological evolution gave us this thing we define as essence, spontaneously in fact (so the secular existentialists are correct in that basic assumption). In fact, we love to overrate ourselves. Most of our actions seem pretty consistent with the behavior of other animals. We’re good at cooperating with each other but we’re also tribalistic, well, wolves form packs (and exhibit similar attributes). We form attachments based on genetic lineage and relationships formed out of a desire for social acceptance, companionship, and sex, just like other species of animal. We have a larger brain size (thanks to the availability of protein early in our evolutionary history), so we have more complex ways of expressing these basal attributes, but that’s all she wrote. In fact, I’d argue that existentialism doesn’t really get interesting until you get to Nietzsche (at this point, at least among most scientists, many of the conclusions of early existentialists, like Kierkegaard, are well established).
So, there’s nothing uniquely human or inherently meaningful (in a metaphysical sense) about the things we attribute to godliness, like caring for each other. We do this instinctually, just as packs of wolves cooperate in the interest of their own survival, mothers nurture their offspring, etc. But then, our pursuit of material success is also rooted in our animalism (sexual competition, the desire for social acceptance, etc.). In other words, we’re mostly slaves to our biology. Our actions, our pursuit of good, seems to be rooted in our survival instinct, the biological impulse to promulgate our genes, etc. So we tend to define good the same way nature (through spontaneous action) has instructed us to define it. And if we’re slaves to nature, something that exists through the result of spontaneous action, then where is the metaphysical meaning? Like, what is good? We mostly define good in ways that suit our survival. In other words, there’s really nothing unique that distinguishes us from other animals even in that regard, beyond larger brain size. And since good is further conflated with ideology (everyone opining that their ideology will better suit our survival), and even tyrants fly under the banner of promoting the public good, is goodness and godliness really a reliable tool to promote a more enlightened society? Perhaps we need something beyond good and evil.
Can we ever escape our slavery to a spontaneous nature (which enslaves everyone from kings to billionaires to peasants)? I think not (no matter how much we evolve … socially, biologically, or intellectually)! The best we can do is conquer nature, but ironically, even our desire to conquer nature is a byproduct of nature 
A good film doesn’t suit my survival, but it makes my survival seem more appealing and convivial. Same for a good neighbour; modern life is a long way beyond bare survival, in most aspects. And “good” is very context-dependent - it’s strange to look for “essence of good” in a thread about existentialism.
“Even tyrants”? It sounds like you’re sceptical about their effect on the public good. Is an enlightened society not a public good?
There’s no nature separate and apart from us. We are part of nature, just as we’re a part of the universe.
Good point, but doesn’t a good film stimulate our senses and provide happiness? I wasn’t saying that we solely act out of a sort of bare knuckled survival instinct. We (like other animals) would like to not only survive, but also enjoy our existence (especially those of us who reject “other worldliness”). And incidentally, happiness does suit our survival, and in the context of a species with as much intellectual capacity as humans have (relative to other animals), our pursuit of happiness will manifest in more complex ways. Dogs were spontaneously given the gift of being able to lick their own genitalia, we have huge brains
Yes of course an enlightened society is a public good (I wasn’t saying otherwise)?
Indeed, and my post was in opposition to the contrary idea implied in the OP (or at least my understanding of it), which is really the implication of “other worldly” claims and philosophical systems (that we are something which is apart from nature or unique in nature, we have an essence that somehow transcends our material existence, and so on).
I think that depends on how one defines happiness and good. There are lots of dangerous sports, risks and challenges that make people happy, and I’m told that heroin feels really good.
I didn’t think you were. But you were arguing that that is an unreliable tool and that we may need something else. If you’re arguing for enlightenment as a public good, how are we to tell you from a tyrant? 
Then we’re agreed
Trixie, your reply was unacceptable - see forum rules 2.1 and 2.2. Any further violations of these rules in Philosophy will earn warnings.
Nature has gifted us with many pleasure centers, which IMO are best understood from the standpoint of evolutionary biology and biochemistry. If sex wasn’t pleasurable, it would reduce our chances of evolutionary success. If we were a species with incredible intellect, yet with no way to stimulate ourselves intellectually, we’d probably be pretty miserable (which again, doesn’t suit survival). So nature selected for things like dopamine expression, opioid receptors, which are important for mediating complex social behavior (like relationships, social attachment, etc.), endorphins (which act like opioids), etc. We found chemicals that can manipulate these pathways and give us heightened pleasure (cocaine, heroin, etc.), but of course only temporarily.
I didn’t use the term “enlightenment” (as an unreliable tool), but rather, perceptions of goodness (or godliness). I was arguing for a standard beyond good or evil … something more robust. We generally define goodness in ways consistent with our survival and other basal instincts. This works pretty well most of the time, but it could also pivot towards xenophobia and put us on a horrible slippery slope.
I begin with the admission that no matter how logically robust any idea or principle may be, our fate (in this context) always depends on ourselves. That is, constitutions (no matter how good), great societies, etc., can be washed away by catastrophe, and the preservation of libertine ideals in any society, is wholly dependent on the quality of its people. In other words, how “enlightened” they are.
This is not true, and I’m puzzled that you think so. The choice, like the outcome, effect of any cause is the expression of the necessity, and emergent quality.
I think the problem lies with the christian part, as given god as the ultimate being has to have known from the beginning of time all the actions and outcomes long before each individual is created, and with that knowledge created each to that end. This is unavoidable.
At least with the Sartrean case the future is unknown to us all no matter how much it is deterministic.