ALB
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But I come from a family that doesn’t just contemplate art but actually practises it !
https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/robin-buick/517
I would say interesting rather than beautiful.
As for Sagan, what’s he talking about? “Emotional” seems to be the word he is looking for as he says what he has in mind is material and can be studied, as our emotions are and can be.
“Spirituality” is quite the wrong word, with its suggestion of non-material spirits which have been shown not to exist. Anyway it’s already been bagged, with more justification, by the Spiritualists.
I agree with Wez that it’s a word we should be suspicious of.
His obituary in today’s Times says he was “a lifelong socialist”. In 1997 he told the London Evening Standard that he had once been a member of our party. As the February 1998 Socialist Standard reported: —
“Asked if his political consciousness had been awakened by meeting members of the ruling class at Cambridge University he replied:
“Actually. I was a member of something called the Socialist Party of Great Britain at school for a while. You had to pass an exam, you known. You could not just join” (Evening Standard, 3 December).”That would have been in Nottingham in the mid 1950s as a result of the outdoor meetings we held there.
I don’t suppose he meant spending too much time carrying out scientific experiments rather than contemplating.
I never said that thinking proceeds brain activity. I just mentioned that as a possibility in the course of replying to LEW’s request to produce the scientific evidence that thinking was linked to physical brain activity.
Your answer seems to be that you know this from your own “contemplation” of how you feel when you think. Quite how you can know from that what is going on in your brain you don’t explain. In any event, only empirical research is going to provide the answer.
The most famous contemplative philosopher was of course Descartes who came up with the conclusion “I think, therefore I am” and so started off the “ghost in the machine” myth that the next century materialists demolished.
He also forgot that he was only to able to think because he was a member of society. He thought in words and words and their meaning are a social product. He should have concluded. “I am a member of society, therefore I think”.
The word “contemplation” reminded me of what Joseph Dietzgen had to say about “philosophic speculation”:
“When we retire to the solitude of our cell to search there in deep contemplation, or, as it were, in the inner-most of our brains, for the right way we want to follow the next morning, we must remember that our mental effort can be successful only because of our previous, if involuntary, experiences and adventures which we, by help of our memory, have taken along into our cell.
That tells the whole story of philosophic speculation or deduction. These philosophers imagine they have drawn their theories, not from concrete material, but from the innermost of their brains, while, as a matter of fact, they have but performed an unconscious induction, a process of thought, of argument not without material, but with indefinite and therefore, confused material. Conversely, the inductive method is distinguished only by this that its deduction is done consciously.“https://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/works/1870s/scientific-socialism.htm
The second half of your comment is philosophical speculation.
I wouldn’t say “philosophical” speculation. That something was going on in the brain when we think would have been that in the 18th and 19th centuries as philosophers sat in their armchairs contemplating. Though even in the 19th century such “speculation” could be a scientific like Darwin’s conclusion that there must be something like what was later identified as genes.
Today, with regard to the brain, it has been established and verified that there is a correlation between recordable brain activity and thinking. That is no longer speculation. What is speculation, ie open to testable hypotheses, is what is the relationship between the two. For instance, does thinking cause brain activity or does brain activity cause thinking or are they part of one and the same process? I don’t know what neurologists are concluding, though there seems to be some evidence that brain activity precedes thinking in some circumstances at least. For instance:
I don’t claim to have any special knowledge in this field but am mainly relying on what I read in the Skeptical Inquirer.
separating the term from its modern use
What is its modern use? People who have read a bit about philosophy will know what its historical use was and why it was controversial (and even progressive as a weapon in the rising bourgeoisie’s ideological battle against mediaeval obscurantism).
But I doubt many others will see much difference between your “did it of own volition” and “did it voluntarily” or “did it of own free will”. Maybe they should but they don’t. And it’s unfair to those who don’t to then attribute to them the idea of a supernatural “self” which won’t be what they believe.
Not that someone would normally say “I did it of my own free will”. That sounds rather pompous and the sort of thing you would only say on some formal occasion as in a court of law. I suspect some are defending it because they as interpreting you as saying that they didn’t do something “of their own volition”. Which, ironically, you wouldn’t object to them saying. Some may do this vociferously, dismissing you as a crackpot for saying that they were forced to do something “of their own volition”.
It’s you who are being vociferous here by pedantically insisting that the word should only be used in its 18th century sense. Actually I agree with you that it can be confusing to use it other than in that sense but I don’t see the need to make a big song and dance about it. It doesn’t make the user a philosophical idealist.
So your anathema for using the mere words “free” and “will” in conjunction only applies to members of the Socialist Party. Members of the Roman Catholic Church, the church that banned Voltaire’s works and excommunicated anyone of their flock that read them, is exempt. Not only can its priests continue to propagate the doctrine if Free Will but its followers should also be allowed to join the revolutionary socialist party. Are you having us on or being wilfully provocative? Voltaire must be turning in his grave.
I agree but I was answering — refuting— comrade TM who claimed that other Party members did hold that view.
I didn’t actually use the F word.
As it now seems to be just a question of semantics and finding a way of describing what people are doing when they make a choice without using the word “free”, I vote in order of preference:
2, 1. 4.
“Of own volition” seems to capture best what is meant. To tell the truth, I can’t really see all that much difference between the first two and “did it freely”. The last one is rather archaic while “wilfully” is positively misleading. So I’m not voting for that even as a 4th preference. I wouldn’t vote for “of free will” either, as it too is misleading and some people kick up such a fuss about it.
Lew, yes, I have met people who consider they have a choice to decide what to do.
But I have not met anyone who thinks that this is because they are “an independent ‘self’ not subject to cause and effect.” That would imply that you could think anything you wanted, irrespective of your past and present experiences as recorded (or whatever) in your brain.
That’s the view I meant was absurd and contrary to the scientific evidence (of neurology). This has established that thinking and deciding is linked to movements within the brain. Even the concept of “self” is, as this is based on memory and memory is also linked to movements in the brain.
I agree that the neither the neurology, nor even less the metaphysics, of thinking and deciding affect the case for socialism (or everyday life).
I won’t waste any more time or go off-topic again answering your ignorant ideas.
That new year resolution didn’t last very long !
Meanwhile, informative article here about the situation in Ukraine. Apparently it’s the same as in Russia and Belorussia:
members there are who believe choices are not bound by cause and effect, but are free; that therefore they are made by an independent “self” not subject to cause and effect.
For the record, I know of no member who holds such an absurd view. In fact I have never met anyone who does.
It flies in the face of all scientific evidence of how the brain works.
It was demolished philosophically by the 18th century materialists, and again decades ago even in academic philosophy as the myth of “the ghost in the machine” by Gilbert Ryle (rather boringly if I remember from my student days).
I imagine it is only taught today in seminaries and theology departments along with other obscurantisms and then only in regard to the relationship between humans and “god”. Even there they accept the findings of neurology in respect of everyday material living.
Of course Socialists don’t believe in “prisons, punishments, abuse, incarceration”.It is not as if this has been discussed before in the Party. Here’s a couple of Conference resolutions on the subject.
“That this Conference recognises that rules and regulations, and democratic procedures for making and changing them and for deciding if they have been infringed, will exist in socialist society. Whereas a ruling class depends on the maintenance of laws to ensure control of class society, a classless society obtains social cohesion through its socialisation process without resorting to a coercive machinery. However, in view of the fact that in socialist theory the word “law” means a social rule made and enforced by the state, and in view of the fact that the coercive machinery that is the state will be abolished in socialist society, this Conference decides that it is inappropriate to talk about laws, law courts, a police force and prisons existing in a socialist society.” (1991)”
“This Conference affirms that any law concerned with the enforcement of class relations or property interests could have no place in socialist society, but that any regulation which may serve the needs of the community could become part of democratic organisation in socialism.” (1998)
What would be the point of having rules and regulations if they could be infringed with impunity by invoking some clever dick argument like “I was only a link in a chain of causation”?
