cladking

All belief becomes a part of the self and belief is the sole motivator of action. It's more the commonality of action which draws together a club.

Not all people are going to agree on anything. But I believe that for philosophy to have meaning or to be able to be applied to knowledge or metaphysics it must be objective on some levels. A philosopher tends to be concerned with things like the definitions of words and logic which defines them and makes them meaningful. We can't express complex ideas in sign language and gestures and have to use words whose meanings can be subjective. There are no doubt many sorts and types of philosophers and some are more intent on discovering things meaningful; to themselves than communicating their discoveries. Ultimately we are all this alone but one of the things that make life meaningful to most humans is communication and sharing ideas (etc). To me personally, objectivity is based on a few simple axioms that we all experience (probably). Such as that it is axiomatic that the world exists as it appears to exist but our observation and knowledge might not apply in any given instance. ie There are optical illusions and observer error. We see only what we expect and are blind to what we don't expect. Time flows in a single direction at a given rate. Logic and reason are the only tools to unlock natures secrets; our current logic involves experiment for proof and a test of theory. Nature is infinitely complex and not understood. Humans are animals and knowledge (and the "unconscious") is created through language. People act on their beliefs and in time become those beliefs. Of course what all philosophers share is a trust in logic or common sense and a willingness to expend effort to understand themselves or their place in the big picture. I believe a great deal of this effort is wasted on definitions and semantics. A great deal of all human problems stem from a misunderstanding and confusion in language. Our primary problems are a lack of communication caused by myriad problems in language. Perhaps one of the greatest problems with language is our inability to know when we don't understand our fellow man.

All well said. I'm in close agreement with your thinking here. At the risk of perpetuating what is primarily a semantical disagreement, I do thing most philosophical types have much broader and more expansive thought patterns. Don't take me wrong here, lots of people who never gave philosophy a second thought can have very deep and very clear understandings but their thought tends to be more "focused" and often more pragmatic. If they plan a chess move six moves in advance then they project any reaction their opponent might take rather than just those that are most probable. I've been looking up at the airplanes since the days they were "all" DC-3's. Maybe it would also be appropriate to describe what philosophers do is getting caught up in things that don't matter. We all know they do but those who accept all the constructs and all the current thinking see philosophers as day dreamers. To each his own and there are seven billion perspectives. Most of the perspectives seem to be eerily similar from my vantage point.

Mebbe, "living outside the box".

Why would humans have lost their instincts. Certainly individuals can lose almost all of their instincts by having them overwritten by knowledge but the species would be unaffected. Even if every individual lost these instincts there are still babies which would possess them. Each of us is very different based on our experiences and learning but people are almost infinitely adaptable. Virtually anything at all can come to seem normal and almost any type of thinking can arise. We have a perspective instilled by education, or western thought, or human progress but every individual grows up with a language and this language defines his nature even more than his instincts. We act on beliefs and in a very real way instincts themselves are a sort of belief that one doesn't even think about. Anytime you do something without thinking it is habit (typical) or instinct or a combination. It seems you are ascribing your beliefs as they apply to yourself to everyone. I'm not even convinced that you have no instincts and you just need to get into a situation that you are unfamiliar with to experience one. Some people can be highly cerebral and consider just about everything before reacting. I know this is rambling but wanted to make several of these points.

The reality of the universe is an imponderable exactly as the existence of (g)God(s) is an imponderable. Both appear to exist but no more can be said about them. While we can't even begin to understand the nature of (g)God(s) we can study the universe we percieve as real. We can study that universe only when we accept it as real or postulate its reality. You can't design an experiment with current knowledge to show that reality or (g)God(s) exist. It seems one has the option of hiding in one's cave or keep on keeping on (until it warms up I've opted for the cave).

It's just the way the brain is wired. This wiring is far more complex and conntains much more knpowledge than people realize. Young have to unlearn what they know before they can be taught. This is mostly complete by the time they say their first word but goes on for years. We misapprehend the nature of "knowledge" because we overestimate the amount of knowledge we have. All real knowledge is visceral and even it is subject to being rewritten. I'd guess the rabbit has far more real intelligence than we give it credit for and we have far less. I'd guess that the rabbit's brain is simply programmed to run at the approach of any animal with eyes and to allow less closeness for anything with eyes in the front of its face. Of course there is a lot more to know to be a rabbit than just when to run and the brain has other necessary programming as well; just like the human brain that is retaught in babies. I can't discuss types of thinking without discussing language and my beliefs about language are wildly unpopular and usually considered off topic. Suffice to say all animals are born with a language specific to that animal. Human language has been lost except with each new human. Reasoning is the ordered means to view fact, information, and observation. Reasoning leads to new knowledge when done correctly. At worst it will lead to the knowledge that all hypotheses are not created equal. There's only one logic but there can be different ways to apply it by using various terms and definitions. Of course, due to the nature of language, I'm really saying far more about myself and my perceptions than about reality itself. I attempt to distill my definitions down to their simplest meaning so that these words do apply to nature itself to as great a degree as is possible with our language. Of course each person reading these thoughts will have his own take on my meaning and walk away with his own understanding. This is impossible to avoid but it should be understood I mean all this literally and exactly as stated in the simplest definitions of the terms used.

In effect since we are a collection of our perceptions we percieve everything that exists.

I believe you are overthinking this. We are what we percieve. We are a collection of all of our perceptions. That our perceptions are such a miniscule part of everything that is percievable isn't really relevant. That we are incapable of even percieving more than a tiny partr of that which is percievable is also irrelevant. Human life is largely to increase our ability to percieve ever more. This just happens to be playing right now; "With one hand on the hexagram and one hand on the girl I balance on a wishing well that all men call the world. We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky, and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye." -Leonard Cohen 1967 Well said. I'm a little inclined to change #2 to 2) The things we know, we don't know ANYthing about. Still well said. Pragmatism needs a lot more weight in philosophy if we're ever to catch up with applying known science to human life.

Some names have meaning on many levels. I'm still learning the levels. No. Probably not. I only computed it to get a feel for a new computer language and the standard was merely "readable". I figure the actual book will almost always have one misprint or error anyway. I think I figured base 30 and you might not even need a z or a q. The point is simply that there isn't room in the universe even for so many atoms much less monkeys and typewriters. I wouln't want to discard a perfect copy just because the Monkey came up with "War and Piece". I believe there was a "natural" human language that has been replaced by modern language. I believe this natural language reflects brain operation which will be similar in most individuals. I believe babies are born with some ability to communicate in this natural language. But even if I'm wrong about these things there should be some thought occuring in all babies. Our inability to comprehend this thought is irrelevant. Babies are not a blank slate except as it relates to learning Chinese, French, or English.

Anyone who will put up with me as a friend is not only a true friend but a saint. A true friend is someone who'll stick with you when you're right and won't make you feel bad when you're wrong. A true friend is usually there when you need them.

It looks like the common ground I thought might exist is quicksand. Some people simply do not share enough definitions, axioms, and perspective to communicate effectively. Normally such differences can be agreed upon with effort but trying to explain every post to every person on a message board is not a good use of time. People are born with a brain and so far as I know it was fully functional for weeks before birth. You say images are upside down but what does a baby know about such things? A baby must think in its own terms and with its own knowledge. But this brain must already have basic programming and some basic way to gain knowledge even before birth. There is probably some internal logic to this programming since nature is logical. If it hurts to touch something then don't touch it. I see no reason to believe that an individual can't attend to this internal logic or a possible expression of that logic (natural language) virtually from birth. That none of us here other than perhaps the OP remembers such a thing doesn't make it impossible any more than his remembering means we should believe it. In my experience some people are strongly predisposed to being philosophical and show this while young. 4.2 x 10 ^ 807,000. Well that's how many you need for "War and Peace". The Koran exists in English and no tool can exceed its nature.

I don't respond to lots of posts because there is no common ground to reach some sort of agreement or even communication. Language meaning is determined by the listener rather than the author so when there is no common ground there is no communication. People can only hear what they want to hear and what they expect so responding under those circumstances will rarely result in communication. One must determine peoples' premises and definitions when there is no common ground and this is not only tedious but usually one-sided so there will still be limited communication. Your other points deserve to be addressed and I intend to address them later. I believe all animals are born with a natural language. Babies have very poor command of this language and it is no longer reinforced and taught by adults. This language has a sort of internal logic and it's the way babies think. It's highly improbable any individual can remember it because it is drilled out by future learning. Some people have very very early memories from before their ability to speak but to my knowledge these memories are invariably smells and sensations or events rather than ideas or memories of situations. No one can remember something outside of his experience, we even have a lot of trouble experiencing things that are completely new and confusion tends to arise. Most of us do have false memories and even our real memories tend to become almost indistinguishable from memories of memories. I'm not confident memories are so much reinforced by coming to the fore as they are recopied though both factors appear to be at work. Can someone actually remember the primal language? I wouldn't rule it out but I'd want to see some of the words and rules. No doubt we all know one word in baby think; mom. Or as my niece says; memmy. But we'll learn her real good. People tend to associate with like minded people. I wouldn't say that those who talk mostly about people are shallow but there is certainly some correlation. Some people may study other people and their reactions. They might know far more about a wider array of things than almost anyone. It's a boring subject to me personally most of the time. To each his own. Societal standards and beliefs are irrelevant to truth. Indeed, they are more likely to stand in the way to discovering truth because they are like blinders on a horse. When a sabre toothed tiger is prowling around the cave it's the individual who has to know how to protect himself. predators don't eat men, they eat an individual. This doesn't mean it's acceptable to toss a baby out to get it to leave but each person has to have a knowledge of ways to protect himself. Societal standards won't save him when he's in the tiger's claws and they'll do almost nothing to keep him out. Everyone's best protection has always been to think for himself. People must be responsible for the outcome of their decisions and outcomes because most of us are not inclined to look beyond the tips of our nose. Of course these ideas seem strange now days in an era that food is adulterated for profit and no one is responsible. It's an era that has simply repudiated all responsibility while malfeasance and driving enterprise to bankruptcy garners bonuses rather than punishment. If your ideas work out and the side effects are no worse than the disease then it was a success.

Don't worry about it in the least. Post if and when it suits. Just make sure you're doing as well as possible. I suppose you may be right. I'm of the opinion that in most practical ways that humans aren't really "intelligent". Or perhaps more accurately we wholly misunderstand the nature of intelligence and greatly overestimate our own and each others' ability to think . I doubt even the tools we use to understand reality are really up to the task so "intelligence" is largely irrelevant anyway. We mistake our awe of nature and our technology as indication of consciousness and intelligence but I doubt either is dramatically different than most other animals. Consciousness, as I'm sure you agree, is nearly universal and intelligence is a misinterpretation of the nature of experimental science to generate technology. While my opinion is that we'd all be better off if we knew this, this is still only opinion. Perhaps people need to believe in things. Children and infants sometimes see things more clearly than adults. Experts are sometimes more likely to be wrong than people with no training and little knowledge. It depends on the subject but "childish" opinions tend to usually be marginalized or ignored. Actually I could speak at great lenght about it but it shouldn't be necessary. This is something I notice because for various reasons I had to teach myself to read minds as a younster. It's not only peoples' phraseology that alerts you to their thoughtprocesses but the subjects on which they speak. Of course on a message board most people are going to be speaking of science and philosophy but it goes deeper than this. It's been said that shallow people talk about other people, most speak about things, events, and places, but then there are some who like to talk about ideas. People who speak almost solely about ideas are almost always very philosophical in nature. Perhaps I should avoid talking about people at this point but I don't give as many clues about myself as most people do. This isn't so much to safegaurd my privacy but rather because it's habit. You may just be picking up on this near total lack of verbal and communication clues. The specific words people choose and the manner they are organized gives a lot of information about a person to those who are adept at picking up on them. It will tell you about a person's upbringing and education. There are even details that can be deduced (provisionally). I don't think I really started out with a philosophical bent as that I was interested in "thought" from a very young age. Most things of any importance or interest to me I could take apart and see how they worked. I had access to great answers for almost any scientific question but no answers at all about thought and what it was. I think my interests in the broader philosophical questions all sprang from this. Then in recent years I've stumbled on a whole different way to view everything and this has affected my perspectives as well. Being a philosopher can be done by anyone probably. All that's required is to think about the questions best addressed philosophically. It seems most people do start young and they tend to be around like-minded people.

I don't think so. I've admitted to knowing the extent of my ignorance in my field. This might be a little arrogant.

I believe a lot of what you're talking about here is more related to perspective than what I mean by arrogance. People in any specialty might have a huge amount of knowledge of that specialty and individuals can also have a lot of knowledge that transcends that specialty. Such a person will naturally be aware of this and will naturally consider himself an expert on matters related to his knowledge base. Some people can wield such knowledge as a weapon or tool but the confidence that is displayed can be taken for arrogance. Perhaps the real problem with this thread is that we each have our own definition of "arrogance". To me a confident self knowledge and knowledge of the natural world, its laws, its processes, and/ or its state is in no way arrogant. "Arrogance" is the belief that the individual is "better" or more "important" than those with less knowledge or whose status is unknown. "Arrogance" is the actions and words of individuals who believe their needs are more important than other peoples' needs and that their pronouncements must be correct because it's what they believe. "Arrogance" is a belief in one's own infalibility. Arrogance isn't really an overestimation of human knowledge because we most all suffer from this. Certainly as we grow older and wiser we learn that we have much less knowledge than we thought we did. As we gain knowledge we gain a new perspective.

I believe the problem is language and the universal unwillingness to share definitions for words. It actually goes even more deeply than this since our words also have nuance and character and these can be misunderstood as well. We make statements that are obviously true but each listener has his own understanding (or lack thereof) so may not see the veracity or even see that it is false. Word definitions are "sloppy" to enable the widest expression of thought but then backfires by being too ambiguous in meaning. Some people take this misunderstanding personally because like religion, logic and reasoning can be at the basis of their beliefs. The only possible "fix" is a vocabulary founded on metaphysics but this is highly improbable since the UN can't even agree on a standard time or on what day midnight falls. We're each our own little nation and there are no interpreters.

I think this is exactly the sort of thing children should be learning. I believe most children who are really paying attention will have many experiences like this. If they think for themselves as many philosophical types do and they don't accept any arguments based merely on the fact that it's made by an authority or is in a book then it's a certainty they will have such experiences. Children need to be taught metaphysics and they need perspective. Much of what we simply take for granted is mere opinion and perspective. They need to learn that the human race is climbing higher on the shoulders of previous generations and that any individual can always be wrong and usually is. It's not intelligence that has gotten us where we are and it is most assuredly not authority. Progress has a tendency to be a sort of refutation of authoritative arguments. Books have a way of being quaint after half a century and obsolete in another century. Perhaps nearly anyone can become a philosopher but most must do it by a young age and most probably have at least some predisposition to it. I don't know how I old I was when I became a philosoper but I was ten when I knew it. I had had a dream that I was sitting still in a tree for so long the animals forgot I was there. A couple birds on a nearby fence started a conversation about whether or not they should let people know that animals can talk. They decided against it. I think it was because they considered human reactions too unpredictable.

Indeed. And now days most decisions are being made by business interests who can't see beyond the bnext quarterly report. In an age that quality of services and products is plummeting to pad the bootom line and line the common land fills the business leaders are taking ever more of the "profits" and wanting our thanks for an economy that hasn't yet fallen off the edge. These are perilous times with numerous trends leading tothe cliff face. The most dangerous aspect of "willfull" ignorance is the belief we know everything. I should have considered war. I came to believe that all out war became impossible in about 1963 but situations change and history is fluid. There may be some madman (men) who believe they can prevail in nuclear war. Certainly populationincrease necessarily increase risk of contagion but there's no real limit on the amount of food trhat can be prodiuced given sufficient energy. Or at the very least this limit is far above current production.

Superstition. Belief kills as do asteroids. Evolutionary decay and economic collapse are a larger threat than ever. The chances of plague go up every year. I believe the greatest threat of a new dark ages is suppression of human freedom by the technological elite and business interests. In a decade or two this fear may be seen dated but don't count on it. Trends in this regard are all highly unfavorable and each year people become less responsible for theior actions and already aren't answerable to results. Generally our leaders are only responsible for what they say. This is very dangerous and gets worse every year. I've always said that we'll find a way to muddle through but this looks less likely than in the past.

I think everyone is logical but most all of us adopt superstitions and these impede logical results. Most superstitions are a form of believing we know everything or reality can be determined with little evidence and intuition. People can believe in almost anything but they think logically in light of these beliefs. A lot of the problem is language because terms are ill defined and language is the mode of thought. It is also communication by which we pick up many superstitions which are passed generation to generation through conditioning and learning. Much superstition is the extrapolation that we know everything because technology has made our lives so easy. People don't notice how slippery language is and some individuals even use poor language to develop ideas and behavior.

I agree somewhat with the contention. It seems most individuals who think about such things do think about the nature of thought and consciousness from a fairly young age but I doubt if this applies broadly. It might mean more that thinking about how we think leads to an interest in philosophy in same cases rather than that they are equivalents. There's also a tendency for such things to run in families so children get exposed to it at younger ages. In other words I suspect a high correlation does exist but it might have relatively little to do with innate characteristics. People often get interested in things in later life or young adulthood that didn't previously appeal to them.

I think you're pretty close to the problem; the status quo. A hundred or two hundred years ago there was a reason for inefficiency and waste but technology has reduced the need for waste. In the past the total amount of waste was more limited because there was far less ability to use resources. Now we have huge machines that can rip vast amounts of valuable material from the earth and ship them almost straight to landfill. It is this flow that powers the modern economy and our leaders are afraid to tinker with it. Instead they make token gestures to increase efficiency or waste more resources for the "good" of people. If we don't have fusion power within the next decade or two there will be an horrendous population decrease caused by all this waste. Our great grandchildren might survive largely by picking through our garbage dumps.

You have several unsupported ideas here if I understand you correctly. But most notable is that in reality health, strenght,and intelligence tend to be strongly positively correlated. It is only through specialization that some traits are forfeited in favor of others. Specialization affects individuals rather than groups. There is some "unnatural" selection that occurs such as Napolean putting the tallest troops on the front lines but height and intelligence are not very closely correlated. Indeed, most unnatural selection is of traits not closely allied with intelligence. If man hasn't actually devolved in terms of intelligence as I believe it is only because women tend to select mates who are more intelligent than they.

Most animals have language. Indeed, it's possible all animals have language as well as some plants. We can't figure out animal language as easily as they learn ours but we have made some inroads into prairie dog language; http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/researcher-decodes-praire-dog-language-discovers-theyve-been-calling-people-fat.html