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⫸STICKY⫷ Journal Articles Regarding Philosophy and Spirituality

belligerent drunk

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Good day, philosophers and spiritualists!

The purpose of this thread is to allow people to post and document journal articles discussing topics related to philosophy, spirituality, and religion - but not limited to, as long as it's pertinent to the purpose of this subforum. There is no age limit on the article - as long as it's relevant to the purpose of this subforum, go ahead and post it.

A typical post should include:
-The topic/title of the article, and a link for readers' access
-A brief description of the concept or argument posed in the article. A representative excerpt from the article (or an abstract) in quoted form is one way to summarize the article.

-(optional) your own opinion regarding the article

Some comments on others' articles and small discussion within the thread is allowed, but if people feel that a certain article or a subject requires a more thorough discussion, then a separate thread has to be created. This is just to keep this thread clean, and easily readable for those looking for articles to read.

Post away! And if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact me, Xorkoth or Foreigner. One resource for finding interesting articles is PubMed.

Credits: thanks to sigmond for the suggestion, and drug_mentor for other help.
 
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Thank you for putting this together b_d! I am hopeful some of the article topics will become topics of individual threads yet to be discussed in P&S. I thought it might be a good idea to start with an article from PLOS ONE which is an open access peer-reviewed journal. Consider this a trial-run i can use as an aid when formatting future posts.

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians

Abstract

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview.

Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes.


“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” - Ayn Rand (1944)

Introduction

Political psychologists have learned a great deal about the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives [1]–[4], but very little is known about the psychological characteristics of libertarians, who are sometimes described as being conservative on economic issues (e.g., against government regulation of free markets) but liberal on social issues (e.g., against government intrusion into private matters like sex or drug use). In the United States, libertarians appear to be rising in both numbers [5] and prominence in national politics [6].

The presidential candidacies of Texas Congressman Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012 and the 2009 birth of the “Tea Party” movement have greatly elevated the visibility and importance of libertarian ideas about individual liberty and the importance of limited government. Many “Tea Party” members are actually socially conservative [7], but emphasize ideas about limited government that reflect libertarian principles.

In this paper, we document libertarian moral psychology, which, as we show, is distinct from both liberal and conservative moralities. We use this unique group to illustrate how psychological dispositions predispose individuals to endorse particular values and choose coherent ideological identifications, consistent with current models of moral intuitionism [8], ideological choice [9], and the moralization of preferences [10].

Conclusions

While not all libertarians endorse the views of Ayn Rand, our findings can be summarized by the three quotations we have presented from her work. We began Study 1 with Rand's exhortation to reject “the morality of altruism,” and we showed that libertarians do indeed reject this morality, as well as all other moralities based on ideas of obligation to other people, groups, traditions, and authorities.

Libertarians scored relatively high on just one moral concern: liberty. The libertarian pattern of response was found to be empirically distinct from the responses of liberals and conservatives, both in our cluster analysis of participants and in our principal components analysis of measures. We found strong support for our first prediction: Libertarians will value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns.

full paper:http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366
 
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Obe

Thanks BD and Sigmond for this page. I have lots of material to contribute at the appropriate time. This post will focus on out-of-body experiences.

Out-of-body experiences have long been studied on the fringes of science, but rarely have they gained mainstream recognition in respectable scientific journals. That changed in 2007 with the publication of work by Ehrsson group in one of the most respected scientific journals Science. Researches found that the induction of out-of-body experiences could be triggered in very controlled conditions in about 1 of 10 subjects.

Ehrsson HH. The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences. Science (2007), 317:1048.

Some relevant links are the commentary section and the article itself. You can always go to Ehrsson group webpage for a full list of publication and developments.
 
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Thank you both for your input already! And main thanks goes to sigmond, as it's his idea for this section - I just put the thread together and will try to keep it in shape. I'm quite busy with work and personal matters at this time, but I'll try to slowly make myself acquainted with relevant literature, and try to contribute myself. If at all possible, let your philosophy buddies know that there's such a thread in existence - maybe we can compile a worthwhile compendium of P&S journal literature.

Happy reading.
 
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i thought i deleted my post since it wouldn't allow me to edit. i'll try to edit it again when i have time. thanks for the thanks guys, but really unnecessary. :)
 
Cool stuff, levelsBeyond!
I remember once my father told me he had read about what apparently was this very study in some book. I thought it was pretty cool at the moment and the first thing that came to my mind was depersonalisation - the state where one feels less identified with their own body. Just as I imagine the subjects of that experiment felt a little weirded out by their own body once they 'returned', fucking with your perception i.e. taking psychedelics can surely mess with how you identify with your own body - triggering DP -, seeing as the sense of self is so malleable and dependent on what we perceive etc
 
Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

We describe similarities in the ontology of quantum physics and of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology. In spite of the fact that physics and psychology are usually considered as unrelated, in the last century, both of these disciplines have led at the same time to revolutionary changes in the Western understanding of the cosmic order, discovering a non-empirical realm of the universe that doesn’t consist of material things but of forms. These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and act in it. We present arguments that force us to believe, that the empirical world is an emanation out of a cosmic realm of potentiality, whose forms can appear as physical structures in the external world and as archetypal concepts in our mind. Accordingly, the evolution of life now appears no longer as a process of the adaptation of species to their environment, but as the adaptation of minds to increasingly complex forms that exist in the cosmic potentiality. The cosmic connection means that the human mind is a mystical mind.

Introduction

When René Descartes declared that the world consisted of two kinds of material, i.e., thinking substance and extended substance, and when Isaac Newton ([1], p. 400) declared that “God in the beginning formed Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles...so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces”, Western Science then became a form of materialism, and anything that wasn’t matter didn’t matter. When Darwin introduced Newton’s materialism into biology, having-or-not-having stuff became the essence of life, and greed and aggression became the natural virtues of our society, segregating one individual from the next, one country from another, and one species from the next. In this way, the classical world was a segregative world, and all aspects of life were affected: The physical sciences had nothing to do with ethics, philosophy had nothing to do with the arts, and the order of the universe had nothing to do with the way in which we should live. As Jacques Monod described it:

“Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes”

In this totalitarian materialistic environment, Carl Gustav Jung had the courage to propose that our mind is guided by a system of forms, the archetypes, which are powerful, even though they don’t carry any mass or energy, and which are real, even though they are invisible. The archetypes exist, as Jung ([3], pp. 43v44) described, in a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature”. Out of this system, the invisible forms can appear in our mind and guide “our imagination, perception, and thinking”.

As it turns out, Carl Gustav Jung’s revolutionary views of the human mind are in perfect agreement with the discoveries of Quantum Physics, which, during the last century, also came as a shock, because they revealed the fundamental errors of Classical Physics and led to a radical change in the Western view of the world. The quantum phenomena now force us to think that the basis of the material world is non-material, and that there is a realm of the world that we can’t see, because it doesn’t consist of material things, but of non-material forms.

These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and to act on us. They form a realm of potentiality in the physical reality, and all empirical things are emanations out of this realm. There are indications that the forms in the cosmic potentiality are patterns of information, thought-like, and that they are hanging together like the thoughts in our mind. Accordingly, the world now appears to us as an undivided wholeness, in which all things and people are interconnected and consciousness is a cosmic property.

In this essay, we will describe the similarities between Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology and Quantum ontology. Our description will show that Jung’s teaching is more than psychology: it is a form of spirituality. By “spirituality”, we mean a view of the world that accepts the numinous at the foundation of the cosmic order. In the same way, Quantum Physics is more than physics: it is a new form of mysticism, which suggests the interconnectedness of all things and beings and the connection of our minds with a cosmic mind.

full:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217602/

NSFW:
i thought some people here might find this interesting. IME text is more difficult to read if its in the quote box, hence no quote box. ;)
 
This article looks great thank you for sharing! I hope this is a step towards legitimizing this 'flapdoodle' of a pseudoscience. I just read the Wikipedia article on Quantum mysticism to get an idea of what this term means in the collective mind at the moment. One thing is for sure, Deepak Chopra has not done anything to help progress the movement. It is important to strike a balance between the science and mysticism components and he is famous for being a little too light on the science part.
 
Also an indispensable resource for my synchronicity book. It should be a nice segwey between the large section about Carl Jung and the section about, well, quantum mysticism and stuff.
 
I thought I would post something by David Lewis, I hope it will be of some interest. The article is called 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel', you can read it here. It should be accessible to those who don't have any background in philosophy. In the article Lewis defends time travel against some common objections, including the grandfather paradox.

Here is a snippet:

What is time travel? Inevitably, it involves a discrepancy between time and time. Any traveler departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from departure to arrival (positive, or perhaps zero) is the duration of the journey. But if he is a time traveler, the separation in time between departure and arrival does not equal the duration of his journey. He departs; he travels for an hour, let us say; then he arrives. The time he reaches is not the time one hour after his departure. It is later, if he has traveled toward the future; earlier, if he has traveled toward the past. If he has traveled far toward the past, it is earlier even than his departure. How can it be that the same two events, his departure and his arrival, are separated by two unequal amounts of time?

It is tempting to reply that there must be two independent time dimensions; that for time travel to be possible, time must be not a line but a plane. Then a pair of events may have two unequal separations if they are separated more in one of the time dimensions than in the other. The lives of common people occupy straight diagonal lines across the plane of time, sloping at a rate of exactly one hour of time 1 per hour of time 2. The life of the time traveler occupies a bent path, of varying slope.

On closer inspection, however, this account seems not to give us time travel as we know it from the stories. When the traveler revisits the days of his childhood, will his playmates be there to meet him? No; he has not reached the part of the plane of time where they are. He is no longer separated from them along one of the two dimensions of time, but he is still separated from them along the other. I do not say that two-dimensional time is impossible, or that there is no way to square it with the usual conception of what time travel would be like. Nevertheless I shall say no more about two-dimensional time. Let us set it aside, and see how time travel is possible even in one-dimensional time

The world—the time traveler’s world, or ours—is a four-dimensional manifold of events. Time is one dimension of the four, like the spatial dimensions except that the prevailing laws of nature discriminate between time and the others—or rather, perhaps, between various timelike dimensions and various spacelike dimensions. (Time remains one-dimensional, since no two timelike dimensions are orthogonal.) Enduring things are timelike streaks: wholes composed of temporal parts, or stages, located at various times and places. Change is qualitative difference between different stages—different temporal parts—of some enduring thing, just as a “change” in scenery from east to west is a qualitative difference between the eastern and western spatial parts of the landscape. If this paper should change your mind about the possibility of time travel, there will be a difference of opinion between two different temporal parts of you, the stage that started reading and the subsequent stage that finishes.
 
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Patrick Grim, There is no Set of All Truths
http://www.pgrim.org/articles/grim_no_set_of_all_truths.pdf

This is a classic in mathematical logic. It contains a proof of the fact that there are too many true logical propositions to fit in any single set (if "a set" is defined in the conventional way). An obvious corollary of this is that there exists no set of all lies, either.
 
I enjoyed that article very much polymath. Short and sweet and something we don't think about every day. i don't know enough about set theory to say (I'm guessing that's what you're hinting at with "set defined in the conventional way" comment), but if we start with an uncountably infinite set of truths as our premise (that's plenty honest for me) does this proof still work? I'm guessing not, but never thought that big before.

Edit: I'm wrong, guess the power set of an uncountably infinite set like the real numbers is indeed a higher order of infinity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_number Cool!

I also came across a really interesting set attributed to Luigi Fantappie that has no subsets so that this type of proof does not work. Apparently people are trying to redefine physics using these concepts. i can only pretend to understand why they are talking about but it was kind of interesting because it shares properties with conjectured holons particles.
 
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Thanks for posting polymath, that was interesting.
 
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Here is 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?' by Edmund Gettier. This is a classic text in epistemology, published over 50 years ago. It is a very short text (3 pages) and anyone should be able to understand it relatively easily.

The counterexamples which Gettier gives are quite strange, but their general pattern can be replicated in order to formulate more plausible ones. In order to appreciate why the second counterexample works it helps to have some familiarity with formal logic, more specifically with the rule of inference known as disjunction introduction, also called or introduction. Given any true proposition it is valid to infer any disjunction which features said proposition as a disjunct, e.g. given 'A' we may validly infer 'A or B' (A v B), and it does not matter at all what 'B' is. In Gettier's example it turns out that proposition 'A' is actually false, but the key point is that because Smith believed 'A' to be true his inference that 'A or B' was justified.

Here is a short excerpt:

Various attempts have been made in recent years to state necessary and
sufficient conditions for someone's knowing a given proposition. The attempts
have often been such that they can be stated in a form similar to the
following:1

(a) S knows that P IFF (i.e., if and only if)
(i) P is true,
(ii) S believes that P, and
(iii) S is justified in believing that P...

I shall argue that (a) is false in that the conditions stated therein do not
constitute a sufficient condition for the truth of the proposition that S knows
that P.
 
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Thomas Nagel – What Is It Like to be a Bat?

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.

But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H2O problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing. It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.

I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.

link
pdf
 
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^That seemed interesting. I think there is a difficulty in science studying consciousness. I do not think it is really up to the task of providing objective findings for subjectivity itself. Its neither a failure in scientific method nor evidence that consciousness doesn't exist to say that science can not really quantify consciousness. The question of whether we all experience green, or sadness, the same way can never really be answered. We just share labels for mind states of our own.
 
i posted it because it was easily accessible, highly cited, and required reading in some philosophy courses. but yeah, you're a prisoner in a tiny skull-sized kingdom and there's nothing you can do about it.
 
Patrick Grim, There is no Set of All Truths
http://www.pgrim.org/articles/grim_no_set_of_all_truths.pdf

This is a classic in mathematical logic. It contains a proof of the fact that there are too many true logical propositions to fit in any single set (if "a set" is defined in the conventional way). An obvious corollary of this is that there exists no set of all lies, either.

For a moment I thought I had fixed this one. Here's what I thought: imagine instead of dealing with 'truths' and 'sets of truths' we are dealing with formulas (in some language powerful enough to express statements about other formulas) and conjunctions of formulas. Then we can express any statement of the form "A is in {A, B, C}" (through the formula "A is a subformula of A & B & C"). Though then I realised this would only work if we restrict ourselves to finite subsets of the set of all truths, and then all the work is pointless anyway since there already is a bijection between a set and the set of all its finite subsets.

In any case, I think it's too tricky to mix so ~specific~ notions (such as power set) of math with informal notions of philosophy*. Both are fine separately, but once you start mixing them, the line gets kinda blurry, it gets hard to see what follows and what doesn't. For instance, back to the subsets of the set of all truths thing: the earlier fix did not work due to statements of the kind "A is in {A, C, D, ...}". Though, what justifies the existence of the subset {A, C, D, ...}? I mean, can you 'define' it? If you can, then it must at least be recursively enumerable and if we restrict ourselves to r.e. subsets of the set of all truths then the formal language fix works. Are these objections justified, unjustified? Why? Why not?

* It goes without saying that "the set of all truths" is not well-defined. Of course math and philosophy overlap in logic, but IMO it's as if they are both different flavours of the same thing - I personally like the point of view that mathematics explores simple concepts taken to extreme situations, always abstracting away from everything, and philosophy deals with very detailed, complex, sophisticated concepts, on trivial situations, not many levels of abstraction up.

We just share labels for mind states of our own.

Whoa, that hit me.
 
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Though, what justifies the existence of the subset {A, C, D, ...}? I mean, can you 'define' it? If you can, then it must at least be recursively enumerable and if we restrict ourselves to r.e. subsets of the set of all truths then the formal language fix works. Are these objections justified, unjustified? Why? Why not?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "definable" here. If I define the set A as "the set of all real numbers that have the number 4 as the first digit in their decimal expansion", then A is clearly not enumerable in any sense. Do you mean that for a real number to be really "defined", there should exist some algorithm to calculate its n:th digit with a finite number of mathematical operations? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

There are probably lots of philosophical questions, such as "do moral right and wrong exist", that can't be expressed with the rigorous language of mathematical logic. But on the other hand, any mathematical statement can be thought to be philosophical, too, so there are even more philosophical truths than there are mathematical ones. At least this is how I personally see it.

BTW, a fun corollary of Grim's result is that if there exists at least one undecidable statement, then there is no set of all undecidable statements (when you have a statement S that is undecidable, you can create an infinite number of statements S v A v B v C... where A,B,C... are all false, and the statement "S v A v B v C... is true" is undecidable too).
 
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^ Yes, yes. I was assuming that the set of all truths was countably infinite. Then if you can state "A is in S" where S is some subset of the set of all truths, then S must be recursively enumerable or the complement of a recursively enumerable set and there are only countably many such sets. So, here's a nice example to show why I think is bad to stretch specific notions of math to philosophy: what is the cardinality of the set of all truths and why?
 
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