PeterJ

The solution to metaphysics is profoundly simple. Or, one solution. This woud be why it is so ofen missed. It is also rather mind-boggling. What is the entire problem of metaphysics, the reason why we cannot easliy just work out what is true about the universe? The reason is that all positive or extreme metaphysical theories are logically indefensible, That is to say, they can be refuted in the dialectic. They give rise to contradictions.This is well known and inarguable. This is the whole problem. So why, we might ask, did Nagarjuna go to such lengths to logically prove that all positive metaphysical theories are logicalyl indefensible? Why spend so much time proving that metaphysics has this devastating problem? It would be because in his eyes this would be the correct solution for metaphysics. For a Buddhist the fact that all these theories cannot be defended in logic would be the proof that none of them are correct. The correct description of the universe would not be a positive metaphysical theory, . . Briefly put this would be the whole solution. It took me ten years to be able to put it so simply. The reason why at this time metaphysics seems to be utterly useless to scientists would be that metaphysics does not see what is right under its nose, the possibility that all positive metaphysical theories are logicially absurd because they are wrong. The universe would be a unity. The details are endless but given time this logical solution can be applied to each philosophical problem in turn and it works. Whether it is 'true' or not is not something worth arguing about, but its logical soundness can be demonstrated. I should say that this is an explanation of something, not an attempt to foist a theory on anyone. For better or for worse, this is the solution that mysticism gives for all metaphysical problems. This is the hurdle that would have to be crossed if we want to see philosophy as solving problems and not just causing them.

Ha. You must admit though, that no management team would allow themsleves to become so booged down as univesirt philsophy has become. This is going to sound outrageous, but I can solve all philosophical problems. I claim no credit, although I did reach my conclusions independently they have been reached countless times before. No time now but am happy to expand.

For Prose - Before answering your question I should say again that I admire DD for various reasons and would place him in a different league to his biologist friend. Really I was getting at a much wider issue, which is the respect we award to philosophers of mind who do not even claim to have solved any problems or acquired much understanding of consciousness, and the lack of attention we pay to people who spend their entire lives studying nothing else who do claim to have solved problems and understand consciousness very well. It is as if there is a uncharted spot on the map of knowledge marked 'Here be dragons'. The most prominent philosopher to have presented a solution for all metaphysical problems would be the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna, who provided the philosophical foundation for Middle Way Buddhism. He does so in the form of a logical proof. It's a nightmare to follow in detail but the result is straightforward. The English philosopher Francis Bradley gives a similar proof in his metaphysical essay Appearance and Reality. I find it difficult to see DD as standing up to any comparison of contributions to metaphysics and philosophy of mind. It is not that I expect everyone to know these philosophers, but it cannot be right that they continue to be ignored despite their claim that they have the only possible solution for consciousness. Dennett's inability to find one and his total rejection of Nagarjuna's solution may not be a coincidence, and he should be honest enough to see this. It's unfair to single him out, but he's in the title.

The ''hard' part of the problem would be the only bit that matters philosophically. The rest is psychology, neuroscience and so forth. He does not solve the ancient Mind-Matter problem, and this is the problem we would need to solve for an explanation of consciousness. What you say above may be true, but it doesn't help us understand any philosophical problems. It comes across as a statement of faith. Nothing changed with the publication of his explanation. It's not nearly weird enough to work in physics.

Multiple drafts is an interesting and useful idea, and not far from what the Buddha proposes, but it is not an explanation of consciousness. . The Buddha's philosophy is, as you say, difficult to discern from the sutras unless we already know what it is. But Nagarjuna later explains it fully. It is a neutral metaphysical position. That is to say, it rejects the idea that Mind or Matter are fundamental. As for empirical evidence, you're right, but only as long as you restrict 'empirical' to mean the data of the physical senses. If we include all direct experience then the Buddha speaks from nothing else but empiricism. But let's not get into that here. The topic is Dan Dennett, and I was just causing trouble by suggesting that he is only a good philosopher by the standards of his tradition, which is a tradition for which consciousness and the whole of metaphysics is inexplicable. I suppose I was bemoaning the narrowness of our university philosophy that he could be in the charts.

Yes, this is a common view. But not mine. My background is in business, not academia, and I prefer to get on and solve problems. On this I part company from the western tradition, for which your comments would apply. You ask what problems philosophy solves. I was asking this at one time. Then I discovered that it solves them all. But this would take us off-topic. My point was only that Prof. Dennett has done no more than add some even more complicated footnotes to Plato. I wouldn't expect him to disagree, so don't see this as a terrible insult but just the way it is.

Andrew - If you look into metaphysics you'll see he solves all metaphysical problems for a fundamental theory. But this is irrelevant. The Buddha is not being promoted as a philosopher. Dennett is. Still, if we compare explanations of consciousness it's pretty obvious who has the better one. ForProse - I'd agree that his prose is brilliant. But this is actually the problem. It is used in support of sophistry. If his prose was less good then this would a lot more obvious. Agree also that the same tactics are used by all sides in the debate. So it's up to us to thread our way through the issues being very wary.

Well, the Buddha found one. Sorry ForProse. It is just that I struggle to remember one thing that Dennett has contributed. I admire him for various reasons but his ability to solve problems is not one of them, and this is the philosopher's principle job. I also dislike the way he misleads his readers with clever words. I consider him to be dishonest.

My view would be that the reason for the dispute is that religion is poorly studied and often lazily equated with objective theism. The issues are more subtle and sophisticated than they are usually given credit for. As 'steep' says, on the atheist/materialist side are some very prominent figures with naïve, extreme and dogmatic views who do represent atheism well, and on the religion side there are prominent figures with similar views who do represent religion well. This is why I would recommend cutting to the chase and studying metaphysics. Bradley calls it 'an antidote for dogmatic superstition', and this would be its chief virtue. Extreme views on both sides suffer badly from a little analysis. My writing is entirely devoted to reconciling religion, philosophy and science, and I have no problem doing this in my head. There is no reason we cannot all do it, but we do tend to have some weird ideas about religion which prevents it happening. Metaphysics is the only neutral territory available to us on which to sort all this out. There we have to think about it logically without all the emotional stuff and childhood baggage.

Favourite philosopher? Has he ever solved a problem?

I think this is not about teachers but the system. I'm not quite clear about ForProse's complaint, but it seems similar to mine. We teach many subjects as if we know a lot more than we do, in order to make the delivery system as cheap as possible, and at high school level teachers have no time to digress from the work-plan if positions in the school league tables are to be maintained. This is maybe just a UK thing. All the same, and I don't mean to simply be rude here, the narrow views of many physicists suggests a rather stifling education system, and it goes much wider than physics. But I may be diverting the discussion from the OP's point with my particular complaints.

I don't think the problem lies with high school teachers. In the UK it lies mostly with the curriculum and the system, which attracts only passive and pliant kinds of teachers. I was once an adviser to primary head teachers in a govt. programme to encourage them to learn more from business people. It was a waste of time. These 'head' teachers are not allowed to make a decision and must rely on instructions from the central administration, and, more depressingly, think this is perfectly acceptable. I would quit on the spot. The complaint I get most is that teachers make the world utterly boring. They did in my day, which is why I gave up physics after three lessons. Teachers these days, as far as I can tell, generally do not know much or think much, but just enough to keep the school somewhere decent in the school league table competition, and the kids are often well aware of this. . .

Let's keep it serious.

I would agree that there is no definition of an intentional God that works in logic, and that for many people a God without intention is not a God. But let's give religion some credit for thoughtfulness. Check out the doctrine of Divine Simplicity, or the definition of Tao or Nibbana. Religion without God does not suffer from the problem raised by Dr Rocket.

I believe it is possible to know whether we are dreaming and thus to wake up. But only by seeing beyond the phenomenal world. As Eddington says, there is no phenomenal way out of the phenomenal world. The dreamer cannot leave the dream because that is where the dreamer lives, but he can stop dreaming.

I'm with you, For Prose. I have heard many complaints from teenagers about the way schools teach. It's usually all about what we know for certain (but which, of course, often we don't) and nothing about what we do not know, which is much more interesting. I used to give my son de-programming lessons so he didn't get sucked in. I fear that these days in the UK the narrowness and strictness of the State curriculum and the mindlessness of the system means that few thoughtful people go into teaching at this level.

You think it necessary to choose? How odd.

In Judaism a Kabbalist would often be a religious atheist. Mystics rarely endorse a simple atheism. I don't know what the ration of atheists to theists is in religion, but it's a good proportion. That's the problem with our commonplace western religion, it leads us to think all religion is the same. Many intended arguments against religion fail because they target only a small handful of believers from down the road.

I think Iota is a westerner who has gone blind. As for what religion can offer atheists, ask a religious atheist. Or perhaps read the literature.

MigL. Your view of determinism seems correct to me, but it would not be correct to say that the new probabalistic view allows freewill. This idea has been well tried and tested in philosophy and it does not pass the tests. It is true, as someone noted earlier, that relgion is often incoherent on this issue. But outside of naive theism religion usually takes a compatabliist position. The advaitan philosopher Ramesh Balsekar writes this, giving the meaning of ‘Wu Wei’, or non-volitional living, as it is found in Taoism. "Living volitionally, with volition, with a sense of personal doership, is the bondage. Would, therefore, living non-volitionally be the way in which the sage lives? But the doing and the not-doing - the positive doing and the negative not-doing - are both aspects of ‘doing’. How then can the sage be said to be living non-volitionally? Perhaps the more accurate description would be that the sage is totally aware that he does not live his life (either volitionally or non-volitionally) but that his life - and everyone else’s life - is being lived. What this means is that no one can live volitionally or otherwise; that, indeed, ‘volition’ is the essence of the ‘ego’, an expression of the ‘me’ concept, created by ‘divine hypnosis’ so that the ‘lila’ of life can happen. It is this ‘volition’ or sense of personal doership in the subjective chain of cause-and-effect which produces satisfaction or frustration in the conceptual individual. Again, what this means is that it is a joke to believe that you are supposed to give up volition as an act of volition! ‘Let go’ - who is to let go? The ‘letting-go’ can only happen as a result of the clear understanding of the difference between what-we-are and what-we-appear-to-be. And then, non-volitional life or being-lived naturally becomes wu wei, spontaneous living, living without the unnecessary burden of volition. Why carry your luggage when you are being transported in a vehicle? " Here is the the infamous Gurdjieff saying the same thing in a chat with Ouspensky. . “I asked G. what a man had to do to assimilate this teaching. “What to do?” asked G. as though surprised. “It is impossible to do anything. A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.” ““How can one get rid of false ideas?” I asked. “We depend on the form of our perceptions. False ideas are produced by the forms of our perception.” G shook his head. “Again you speak of something different,” he said. “You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am not speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions man can err more or err less. As I have said before, man’s chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him - all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind. Everyone finds that nothing is being done in the way it ought to be done. Actually everything is being done in the only way that it can be done. If one thing could be different everything could be different. … Try to understand what I am saying. Everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is.” This was very difficult to swallow. “Is there nothing, absolutely nothing, that can be done?” I asked. “Absolutely nothing”. “And can nobody do anything?” “That is another question. In order to do it is necessary to be. And it is necessary first to understand what to be means.” And here is Keith Ward from his brilliant book on God. “Most philosophers, whether they believe in God or not, think that everything in the universe is caused. So if we knew the laws of physics or the will of God completely, we would see that things just have to be the way they are. There are no alternatives. But they also think that human beings are properly held responsible for their actions, at least sometimes, and therefore that they are somehow free to do otherwise. So they have the problem of seeing how somebody can be free to do otherwise, when there is no alternative to what he or she does. Most philosophers … have thought that you have to believe both of these things, that there are no alternatives to what happens, and that people are sometimes free to do otherwise This is called compatibilism. Augustine believed it. Aquinas believed it. Calvin believed it. Kant believed it. Spinoza believed it. Almost everyone believes it.” Keith Ward God - A Guide for the Perplexed Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2002 (131)

I would rather say that a compatablist takes the view that freewill and determinism are not exhaustive and not mutually exclusive phenomena, thus would not form a true contradictory pair for the dialectic, and are thus a false dichotomy. This would be the advaita view, or more generally mysticism. I think it would be correct to say that on this question compatabilism is the most popular option for philosophers of all persuasions. For the mystic specifically our 'actions' would be no more free than the movement of a raindrop in a thunder storm. Yet, at the same time, we would have a responsibility for them. This would be because we would have a responsibility for who and what we are, what sort of person we are and what we believe, thus how we react to stimulus. But given who we are, this is how we will react. There would be no opposition between freewill and determinism except as philosophical concepts. Rather, both on their own would be incorrect views. This would be the reason why neither on its own quite makes sense.

Okay. It was a technical question really. I wondered whether imbalance, non-equilibrium, is required for the scientific idea of energy. I assume so, but was checking.

I would agree with your comments on on karma, harshgoel1975. Interesting thoughts about energy. Would it be correct to say that energy requires imbalance?

I think there must be no end to the possibilities of even just human experience. Still, I suppose boredom may set in. In Zen there is, 'your face before you were born.', and we are advised to get to know it.

Deepak - An ultimate phenomenon cannot have an origin. It is the origin.