Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 07/12/2024 19:21, Rich wrote:

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 07/12/2024 10:20, D wrote:

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On Fri, 6 Dec 2024, rbowman wrote:
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On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 10:09:11 +0100, D wrote:
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Don't even go there.  Natural and I had very lively discussions on
that theme.  But yes, I'm in the camp of the people who accept the
real world as a fact, and that without humans, there's no ethics,
math, true or false.

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Buddhism has the concept of two truths, conventional and ultimate.
Conventionally I went out this morning to feed two cats.
Ultimately 'cat' is a construct I imposed and there aren't two of
anything.
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https://thebuddhistcentre.com/system/files/groups/files/heart_sutra.pdf
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Nietzsche condensed into a couple of hundred Chinese ideograms...

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Buddha seems to have been far ahead of his time.  I really like his
position on god, that instead of speculating, they should "shut up
and meditate".  ;)
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There are states of mind that can be achieved that clarify  why
people started talking about gods and spirits and other realms in the
first place.

 Some portion of the "why" for gods and spirits can also be seen from
the Arthur C. Clarke quote:
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
    magic".
 To proto-humans, living in caves, with predators at every turn,
something like the lightning from a thunderstorm would seem to be an
"unimaginably advanced technology" and so appear as "magic" and in
order to try to "explain" its existence it becomes easy to pass it off
as some "sky spirit" that is "unhappy" with what Grog did earlier
today.  Let that continue for a millenia and you get all the modern
'sky spirits' that continue to be followed by many today.
 We, today, understand lightning as just a huge static electricity
discharge.  But that understanding rests on a lot of "shoulders of
giants" along the way to the scientific discoverys necessary to
understand why it occurs.
 

Absolutely, but I meant a bit more than that. There was a guy - probably still is - who considered that all religions were descendants of shamanism.  And shamanism itself was an attempt to shrug off what we would call the normal states of mind and investigate other ones, typically interpreted as the realms of spirit, encounters with the Great Spirit or the Dream Time.
Use of hypnotic drumming, psychedelic herbs  and fungi and so on was all part of it. And what they found there, became the substance of religious myths. Watered down sanitised and popularised for reasons of social control and cohesion.
And the things such as lightning were, they concluded, from that place. Another realm where great forces played out.
The same realm that now contains 'natural laws' - these are precisely what they called gods and spirits, as you say. What Kant called 'the noumenal world'  -  the realm of causes, as opposed to effects, which is the phenomenal world.
So the idea of a 'separate realm' where 'causes live' persists today. Although we commonly mash it into the material  world as if the existence of 'gravity' were equivalent to the existence of a hamburger.
Instead of one being data and the other metadata...
--
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
  – Will Durant