1. Dissent � The uncertainty demonstrated by the differences of opinions among philosophers and people in general.
2. Progress ad infinitum � All proof rests on matters themselves in need of proof, and so on to infinity.
3. Relation � All things are changed as their relations become changed, or, as we look upon them from different points of view.
4. Assumption � The truth asserted is based on an unsupported assumption.
5. Circularity � The truth asserted involves a circularity of proofs.

Pyrrohnians are in a sense parasitic: they don't create new premises or argument structures. They simply expose the inherent contradictions in others' philosophies.

The Skeptic strategy:

1. Take usual philosophy as starting point.
2. Derive "knowledge is impossible."
3. Wait to be challenged as "self-refuting".
4. Wait for the challenger to realize that, actually, it is usual philosophy that is self-refuting.

Nietzsche

Each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic.

Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.

Tractatus 6.54

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

Wittgenstein

peritrope: if you claim to refute all knowledge, then you know that you have refuted all knowledge, which is a contradiction.

apraxia: you can't stay alive unless you act as if you have knowledge.

Peritrope (Greek: περιτροπή) is Socrates' argument against Protagoras ' view of relative truth, as presented in Plato's book known as Theaetetus (169-171e).

It means "a turning back on one" and likened to the image of a snake devouring its own tail. Socrates' peritrope described Protagoras' view as a theory that no longer requires criticism because it already devours itself. Sextus Empiricus is thought to have given the name in a comment on Protagoras' view in Against the Logicians.

One practical problem with externalism is that it makes it difficult to program an agent such that it can know what it knows.

Namely, because the agent can't find justification inside itself (justification is external), the agent cannot (unless it asks for help) separate its unjustified beliefs (definitely not knowledge) from its justified beliefs (not yet knowledge, but pretty close) from its pile of blind beliefs.

And who is the agent going to ask for help from? Other agents? But all agents would have the same problem if knowledge is external in our world.

In such a world, agents can know lots of things, but they cannot know what they know. Since humans (claim to) know plenty of what they know, human philosophers find the externalism theory of knowledge a bad fit to what they observe.

This allows justified true belief:

Belief: the person believes in it (blindly).

True: the world makes it true.

Justified: the world makes it justified (here is where externalism differs from the others).

Eric: I will define phenomenal consciousness by examples and folk psychology!

Phenomenal consciousness is the most folk psychologically obvious thing or feature that the positive examples possess and that the negative examples lack. I do think that there is one very obvious feature that ties together sensory experiences, imagery experiences, emotional experiences, dream experiences, and conscious thoughts and desires. They’re all conscious experiences. None of the other stuff is experienced (lipid absorption, the tactile smoothness of your desk, etc.).

Bakker: Which part of our brains is making the "obvious" verdict? Not folk psychology, but folk philosophy!

Typically, recognition of experience-qua-experience is thought to be an intellectual achievement of some kind, a first step toward the ‘philosophical’ or ‘reflective’ or ‘contemplative’ attitude. Shouldn’t we say, rather, that phenomenal consciousness is the most obvious thing or feature these examples share upon reflection, which is to say, philosophically?

Eric: Also, any theory of phenomenal consciousness must explain why it is obvious, but we are struck with wonder and confusion when we stop to think about it.

If the reduction of phenomenal consciousness to something physical or functional or “easy” is possible, it should take some work. It should not be obviously so, just on the surface of the definition. We should be able to wonder how consciousness could possibly arise from functional mechanisms and matter in motion. Call this the wonderfulness condition.

Bakker: Yeah, I understand that. It's just like St Augustine with time

“What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”

And I can explain both the same way! The reason is that we know how to use time, but not how to theorize abstractly concerning time. Similarly, we know how to use phenomenal consciousness, but not how to theorize abstractly about it.

Why?

Evolution! We die if we don't know how to use time, but nothing bad would happen if we can't theorize time. Similarly for phenomenal consciousness.

Why would we die if we don't know how to use phenomenal consciousness? Bakker doesn't explain, though presumably it is important for something (otherwise evolution would not have produced it).

Why is there such a difference between using and theorizing? That brings us to two families of cognitive processes.

Family 1: source sensitive. Such a process is evolved to deal with causal mechanisms (basically, doing science, asking "how", although in an unschooled, primitive way). Because it deals with causal mechanisms, and everything has a previous cause, the process always has "open slots" where more information can be sent in for processing.

This family is more versatile and it is responsible for the dramatic scientific progress.

Family 2: source insensitive. A member of this family would have "fixed input format" as an analogy. It would not request for information on "and what happened before that?" or "and what is inside this black box function?".

This family is inflexible, and it is responsible for the endless philosophical debates.

In fact, they are blind to these further information, and blind to their blindness. The result is that subjectively, when thinking using such source-insensitive cognition processes, the feeling is a sense of sufficiency: there's nothing lacking. No puzzling fact that requires expanding. No "and what happened before that?"

Phenomenal consciousness seems to be made of family 2 processes. That's why it feels so complete even if it is so information-poor.

A great metaphor here. A luggage is a box (concept) that contains a lot of clothes (instances). If the luggage is "too big" ("inflated", meaning either "metaphysically inflated" -- it adds spooky real things to the world, like ghosts and qualias and world souls -- or "epistemologically inflated" -- it adds spooky ways to gain knowledge, such as direct and accurate introspection, which is already experimentally disproved), then you can't bring it on the plane (to your philosophy). But you might try to bring all the clothes without using a luggage by simply listing all the examples without giving an abstract concept that allows you to derive the examples.

See also The Ptolemaic Restoration: Object Oriented Whatevery and Kant’s Copernican Revolution | Three Pound Brain

Socrates invites us to think of the mind as an aviary full of birds of all sorts. The owner possesses them, in the sense that he has the ability to enter the aviary and catch them, but does not have them, unless he literally has them in his hands. The birds are pieces of knowledge, to hand them over to someone else is to teach, to stock the aviary is to learn, to catch a particular bird is to remember a thing once learned and thus potentially known. The possibility of false judgment emerges when one enters the aviary in order to catch, say, a pigeon but instead catches, say, a ring-dove.

Philosophical Investigations

Later continental philosophers would use this to politicize knowledge. Especially Foucault. He basically claimed that power determines the standard by which we judge what is knowledge and what is just heresy.

A darker version of Sellar's "game of giving and asking for reasons".

Hint of the introspective illusion: we don't introspect directly, but we merely apply Theory of Mind on ourselves.

"There is nothing outside the text." is like visual anosognosia. Not only can't they see things that aren't text, they can't see that they are blind.

One example from Jacques Derrida (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Our most common axiom in ethical or political thought is that to be just or unjust and to exercise justice, one must be free and responsible for one’s actions and decisions. Here Derrida in effect is asking: what is freedom. On the one hand, freedom consists in following a rule; but in the case of justice, we would say that a judgment that simply followed the law was only right, not just. For a decision to be just, not only must a judge follow a rule but also he or she must “re-institute” it, in a new judgment. Thus a decision aiming at justice (a free decision) is both regulated and unregulated. The law must be conserved and also destroyed or suspended... justice is impossible.

In short: if you follow rules, you are an amoral machine. If you don't follow the rules, you are an amoral anarchist. You're damned either way.

Philosophers noticed the first-person effects of LWOS, and tried to derive philosophies out of them. They failed, because they didn't have the neuroscience to actually understand the first-person effects of LWOS through third-person, neuroscientific theory.

the prototype of all conceived times... the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible

William James, The principles of psychology.

"Free will" is an illusion caused by the fact that the "darkness that came before" a conscious idea remains unconscious. Since we don't notice the darkness that came before, we presume the ideas pop up "freely" (that is, unbound by causality).

It took such a long time for people to discover that they are not in one piece, because it is profoundly unintuitive. Intuitively, I am in one piece, because the information that can reveal the fractionate nature of me is never raised to the level of consciousness (except perhaps in some psychopathologies).

In the same vein, there is the "Bayesing Qualia" paper, which posits that qualias are an explanation conjured up in the brain to explain certain features of its inference mechanism.

Bayesing qualia: Consciousness as inference, not raw datum A Clark, K Friston, S Wilkinson - Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019

"The illusion of sufficiency".

In Caution Flag | Three Pound Brain, there is a very dramatic example of illusion sufficiency:

Consider the following one sentence story about Johnny:

S1: Johnny went to the corner store, grabbed some milk, then came home to watch Bill Maher.

This is innocuous enough in isolation, until you begin packing in some modifiers:

S2: Johnny went to the corner store, stepped over the blood running into the aisle, grabbed some milk, then came home to smoke a joint and watch that idiot Bill Maher.

Pack in some more:

S3: Rather than take his medication, Johnny went to the corner store, shot the guy at the till in the face, stepped over the blood running into the aisle, grabbed some milk, then came home to smoke a joint and watch that liberal scumbag idiot Bill Maher with his neighbour’s corpse.

Oof. That Johnny’s fucking crazy, man.

It's an extended analogy: if we see two things and don't notice some difference in need of explaining, we assume they are the same by default, and don't even think about whether they are really the same.

Similarly, if introspection neglects enough information, it would lead to a lot of unnoticed identifications.

For another example, people didn't notice difference between the position of earth today and yesterday, so they assumed the earth remains in the same position by default, even though they could have noticed that if the earth goes around the sun, it would give the same observations.

Cognition Obscura | Three Pound Brain

Bakker elsewhere remarks that philosophy is an academic subject where people seriously talk about literally supernatural beings like "intentionality" and "norms", and yet it purports to be prior to science.

Kind of like using Ted Bundy’s testimony to convict Mother Theresa.

See A Eulogy for the Unconscious (1895 – 2012) | Three Pound Brain

And his master narrative could very well be true: that the Unconscious finds its historical origins beyond the horizon of the outer, objective world, then gradually migrates to its present locus beyond the horizon of our inner, subjective world.

The Unconscious, in other words, is of a piece with gods and underworlds, a way of comprehending What We Are Not in terms of What We Are. It’s literally what happens when we rebuild Mount Olympus into our skull. This explains why it’s such a curious double gesture, why, in the course of disempowering us, it allows us to own our abjection. My skull, after all, remains my skull, and if What We Are Not resides inside my skull, then ‘I own it.’ We bitch about our Unconscious to be sure, but we cluck and joke about it as well, the same way we do when our children are obstinate or wilful. ‘A Freudian Slip’ is almost always an occasion for smiles, if not laughter.

In fact, before 18th century, science was mostly theoretical. Technology, obtained by tinkering and trials, with no theoretical guidance, went along without science.

This demonstrates the depths of humanity's theoretical incompetence:

• Philosophy, the most theoretical subject, has made almost no progress and resolved no problems.
• Science, a rigorous and methodical theoretical project, did not substantially progress until starting around 16th century, and even then it took another 2 centuries for it to start guiding technology.
• Technology, the most practical subject, has made plenty of progress way before science has started making steady progress.

The term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands with a chlorine solution before moving from one patient to another, or, most particularly, after an autopsy. (At one of the two maternity wards at the university hospital where Semmelweis worked, physicians performed autopsies on every deceased patient.) Semmelweis's procedure saved many lives by stopping the ongoing contamination of patients (mostly pregnant women) with what he termed "cadaverous particles", twenty years before germ theory was discovered.

The popular understanding of Nietzsche has domesticated him into a tepid motivational speaker about "Being the best you can be."

The humanities people tend to do the same (except in words way harder to understand).

Bakker's signature move: dissolving a philosophical position/problem by an analysis of how human brains work quite well by heuristics (in daily life, but not in philosophy) despite lack of information (Blind Brain Theory). How this heuristic creates illusions that trap philosophers into stupid positions, like continental philosophy.

Very much like a born-again Christian trying to convert a lost soul.

See The One-Eyed King: Consciousness, Reification, and the Naturalization of Heidegger | Three Pound Brain for explanation.

Two jargons invented by Heidegger. Roughly, it means "humans are thrown (geworfen) into the world without explanation, as a brute fact."

Priam (father of Hector) lamenting the death of Hector.

You, you were their greatest glory while you lived— now death and fate have seized you, dragged you down [into the House of Death]!"

Book 22 of the Iliad.

The big threat to humanities is not reductionism (which isn't necessarily what science says), but the death of intentionality (which is a necessary outcome of science as it's done since centuries ago).

The real problem is not whether humanities can explain its subject matter (certain human activities), but rather whether its subject matter would still exist in a few decades.

And how should we account for cultural history, psychology, and philosophy? Perhaps... with SCIENCE?

Don't quote Godel as a cheap rejection of scientism. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem can be avoided in practice by using weaker systems of arithmetics sufficient for physics.

It is a category mistake in the first-person view, but not in the third-person view.

In the first-person view, "Beethoven is better than Spears" is an aesthetic fact, not a natural fact. In the third-person view, "the author thinks "Beethoven is better than Spears"" is a natural fact.

We do have preliminary results. See for example experiments by Pascal Boyer testing which ideas are easier to transmit.

Cognitive templates for religious concepts: Cross‐cultural evidence for recall of counter‐intuitive representations P Boyer, C Ramble - Cognitive Science, 2001

Be careful. This line of thought quite readily get you into rejecting Newtonian mechanics as vacuous, since we don't know how to quantify inertia except by further details of how to measure it, the details themselves involving assumptions on inertia.

Or it might lead you to denounce "dark matter" or "miscellaneous causes not yet quantified".

But philosophy needs science as a background condition for what they do even more.

Radioactive dating solved many problems in history by precisely dating the time of an artifact.

Charles A. Whitney, in the article "The Skies of Vincent Van Gogh," provides scientific evidence of astronomy as a means to explain the origins of Starry Night and other van Gogh night sky paintings.

Ineliminable Inscrutability Scrutinized and Eliminated

Brandom rejects two possible theories of normativity (rule-following).

Regularism:

If a given performance conforms to some pre-existing pattern of performances, then we call that performance correct or competent. If it doesn’t so conform, then we call it incorrect or incompetent

Brandom's objection: Regularists can't distinguish between what happens and what ought to happen. We don't say "gravity ought to work", so a Regularist must somehow explain why the Law of Gravity is not normative, while the Law of US is a normative.

Everything in nature ‘follows’ the ‘rules of nature,’ the regularities isolated by the natural sciences. So what does the normativity that distinguishes human rule-following consist in?

Regulism: rules are certain declarative sentences like "No smoking.", and rule-following is behavior that is described by the rules.

Brandom's objection: rules can't be made entirely explicit. There must always some unsaid rule to avoid an infinite regress, like "the rule about following rules" and "the rule about the rule about following rules" etc.

Wittgenstein said this about how the infinite regress is cut off by unspoken rules that are followed in practice.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

Thus, there is a necessary implicitness, or "blindness", in rule-following behavior. At some level, we simply follow rules without understanding.

But then, a challenge! How is "implicit norm" even possible?

How can a performance be nothing but a ‘blind’ reaction to a situation, not an attempt to act on interpretation?

Unconscious rule-following is automatic, therefore not normative, much like a sneeze, or falling in gravity is not normative.

Or is it? Perhaps we are forced to conclude that fundamentally, norms are based on mechanical, thoughtless behaviors. In this way, we can naturalize norms in a norm-less theory (such as neuroscience).

Brandom refused this, and insists that we must then admit "nonconscious norms". He even proposes a kind of non-natural metaphysics, where non-natural normativity is baked into the metaphysics.

But Bakker has a better idea: explain norms in a norm-less scientific theory

The history of the social sciences is a history of emancipation from the intellectual propensity to intentionalize social phenomenon—this was very much part of the process that Weber called the disenchantment of the world. Brandom proposes to re-enchant the world by re-instating the belief in normative powers, which is to say, powers in some sense outside of and distinct from the forces known to science.

Bakker's Blind Brain Theory

Now Bakker begins his own philosophy, using Blind Brain Theory.

Note how important is implicit/blindness in Wittgenstein's and Brandom's explanations of how norms work. But they never paused to consider it deeper than a simple "Such implicitness means implicit normativity exists." They then went on to consider normativity without studying further just what are implicit, and how they are implicit.

This is a grave error. To explain normativity, we must study what are implicit and how they are implicit in the brain when people think normative thoughts and do normative actions. We must study the neglect structure of the brain, and that brings us to Blind Brain Theory.

According to BBT, all cognition is heuristic and depends critically on the environment to play nice (that is, remain stable). Heuristic algorithms can skip many steps and come out right, as long as the environment rarely challenges it with difficult examples that exposes the error of the heuristic.

Normative cognition is also heuristic -- what features of the human environment does it depend on?

Wittgenstein again

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

The "bedrock" is the stable normative behaviors of other humans I live with. In other words, Regularism is actually the right approach to explaining normativity.

Brandom was wrong to reject Regularism, but to see why he was wrong, we must do some psycho-philosophy. We must understand why the human animal is psychologically prone to reject Regularism (just like how it is psychologically prone to think souls exist). It is, again, because of BBT.

We think "This rule is normative." when some normativity-detection cognitive module is triggered. If the module keeps quiet, and we have the distinct feeling of "Wait, that's not normative...", no matter how much information processing the other modules do. And it just so happens that thinking about causes and statistical correlations cannot trigger this module.

There are roughly two types of explanations: causal/natural and normative/supernatural. Causal/natural explanations are those step-by-step explanations that intrinsically allows you to break it down further ("how does this step work?"), push it forwards and backwards in time ("and what happened before/after?"). Normative/supernatural explanations are those brute assertions about what to do and not to do ("This is simply what I do."), accompanied with an anosognosia, a blindness to the blindness, a feeling that the assertions are sufficient with no further explanations possible ("What do you mean I must explain why it is what I do? I have explained myself sufficiently. There is nothing left to explain!")

Since Regularism involves solving normative cognition using the resources of natural cognition, it simply follows that it fails to engage resources specific to normative cognition.

Bakker is in no danger of self-contradiction, because the problem "how does normative cognition work?" is perfectly possible to be the kind of problem that causal cognition can solve. Sure, causal cognition can't solve all problems, but it can solve some... like "how to build a plane?" and "how the brain works?" Science works, and that shows the power of causal cognition. In contrast, nothing sophisticated like science has been built upon normative cognition. This shows that causal cognition can solve normative cognition, while normative cognition can't.

What doesn’t follow is that normative cognition thus lies outside the problem ecology of natural cognition, let alone inside the problem ecology of normative cognition.

In short, Brandom failed because he tried to solve normativity with normative cognition. Bakker may succeed, because he is trying to solve normativity with causal cognition. The feeling that "normativity can't be solved causally" misguided Brandom, and it is just an illusion generated by the fractured nature of cognition, described above.

normative cognition seems unlikely to theoretically solve normative cognition in any satisfying manner. The very theoretical problems that plague Normativism—supernaturalism, underdetermination, and practical inapplicability—are the very problems we should expect if normative cognition were not in fact among the problems that normative cognition can solve.

Here is Bakker's explanation of normative cognition, and how it leads to Brandom's mistake:

normative cognition belongs to social cognition more generally, and that... has evolved to solve astronomically complicated biomechanical problems involving the prediction, understanding, and manipulation of other organisms absent detailed biomechanical information. Adapted to solve in the absence of this information, it stands to reason that the provision of that information, facts regarding biomechanical regularities, will render it ineffective...

... intentional cognition has evolved to overcome neglect, to solve problems in the absence of causal information. This is why philosophical reflection convinces us we somehow stand outside the causal order via choice or reason or what have you. We quite simply confuse an incapacity, our inability to intuit our biomechanicity, with a special capacity, our ability to somehow transcend or outrun the natural order.

Blind Agents

This section reviews Making-it-Explicit (Brandom, 1998), which was a serious attempt to explain how we explain. Brandom tried to reconcile the tension between mechanical implicit with the philosophical implicit.

He argued that, though we can't find intentionality in the physical and biological laws of nature, we can find it in the conversations people make in a society. Intentionality is a myth that becomes real when enough people vocalize that myth when they talk to each other.

Kinda like money, really. Pieces of paper or lumps of gold become exchangeable for goods when enough people take them as exchangeable for goods.

To make his argument, Brandom reviewed the history of explaining how we explain.

Kant

Kant argued that there are rules that are necessary for anyone to explain anything. For example, when we explain to someone about why the sky is blue, we assume that they are "rational", is going to "take us seriously", will interpret the words we say the same way we interpret them, etc. All these necessary rules are moral rules, which makes them immune to scientific understanding. Kant calls these moral rules "practical reason" to distinguish them from scientific understanding of the world ("pure reason").

In this way, Kant separated a few objects (God, immortal soul, free will) from scientific understanding, and that allowed him to simply assert that they must be true because we need those concepts to do things.

Bakker would criticize this as Kant trying to do behavioral psychology by purely thinking inside his own little head. Kant's approach is doomed because introspection is an unreliable hack meant to work only for talking with people in daily life, and we can't even understand what actually goes on inside our own heads without science.

Kant: "We need God, immortality of the soul, and free will in order to do things."

Bakker: "Well, time to check that claim with behavioral psychology. I bet Kant's wrong!"

Frege

Frege argued that normative explanations are incompatible with causal explanations. If I explain why I helped you using behavioral neuroscience, I would have made a "modal mistake", since the right explanation must be normative rather than descriptive.

Explication is an intrinsically normative activity. Making causal constraints explicit at most describes what systems will do, never prescribes what they should do.

Since how we explain is constrained by normative things (as Kant argued), and normative things cannot be explained with descriptive statements (as Frege argued), any explanation for how we explain must be made of normative things.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein argued that the implicit assumption behind every explanation is in the other people who hear the explanation. You can't be understood unless other people follow some shared rules. Telling others to follow a rule of understanding like "law of noncontradiction" only works if the other people agrees to that rule and agrees with you about how to use that rule.

"Don't contradict with that statement you made before."

"Why not? And did I really make a contradiction?"

while rules can codify the pragmatic normative significance of claims, they do so only against a background of practices permitting the distinguishing of correct from incorrect applications of those rules

Thus, an explanation of how people explaining must explain why people follow rules. This explanation "why you should follow rules" is itself a normative rule and requires normative explanation.

"You can't say that! It's against rule X."

"What's the problem?"

"It's against the rule-rule to go against rule X!"

"What's the problem?"

"It's against the rule-rule-rule to go against rule-rule!"

Overview

Kant proposes that we are blind to the "things in themselves", such as God, immortal souls, and free will. This blindness allows us to imagine those things as much as we like since science can't say we're wrong about them.

Wittgenstein proposes that we, as a society of people talking to each other, are blind to the rules that support conversations with other people.

With those philosophers, Bakker agrees that our severe blindness is what gives rise to the properties of consciousness, but insists that consciousness can be fully described by science, explaining away all normative statements in the process.

"Reason is not causal. The state of my thought now is not determined by anything before. Reason is invisible, inaudible, not measurable, completely insensible. Reason has no causality. Reason has no physics. Reason is... indeed, completely supernatural and unphysical."

Kant proposed that we can't help but think about things in space and time, and can't help but do things for right and wrong. These two kinds of "can't help but" are the same kind: they are both caused by our biological constraints.

In John 9, Jesus meets a man born blind. To show that He is indeed the “light of the world” (John 9:5), Jesus heals the man. “He spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (this word means ‘Sent’). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing”

Liberal democracy is distinguished from all previous prevalent political systems (monarchy, dictatorship, Roman republic...) in that it attempts to stay as agnostic as possible about "What is the good life for a person?"

Liberal democracy basically says, "You do you. Don't hurt others. Otherwise do whatever you want, or not. We don't care. We are not allowed to care. It would be intrusive of us! We are not going to tell you what's the meaning of life, or what is good, or what is valuable."

Even the First French Republic had a state religion (although they called it "Cult of Reason"). Modern republics don't even have a state religion anymore.

The Enlightenment is the start of rational reflective criticism: people started to ask "Why do we do what we do?" and found many of their traditions stupid, unreasonable, unbelievable. They can't hold on to these traditions anymore.

The traditions used to hold people together and make them agree on "what's the good life?" Now it can't.

Humans confabulate all kinds of rationalizations to their urges, but their urges are basically the same, since they are all human animals descended from a common evolutionary history.

For example, religions have wildly different theologies (rationalization), but basically the same sanctioned behaviors (moral urges).

This has similarities with Alexander Goldenweiser's analysis of primitive art:

involution is described as an in- herent tendency in "primitive" art towards complexity, elaboration, and repetitiousness- the "earmarks of involution".

However, modern art involutes away from repetitiousness.

Summary:

Metaphysical philosophers who want to figure out how we know (epistemology) and what we are (ontology) are like astronomers who want to figure out what the universe is like.

Dogmatic philosophers were like medieval astronomers who learn about the heavens strictly by reading old books.

Kant and other continental philosophers were like astronomers with visual anosognosia.

Bryant is like a visual anosognosiac who smashes telescopes and cyborg eyes.

What they need is SCIENCE.

They are both stuck. Kant and continental philosophers are stuck with "correlationalism", while the others (such as the OOO) are stuck with "anticorrelationalism". One starts with the subject, the other starts with the object.

They are both wrong because the subject-object dichotomy is wrong. It is just a cartoon, a heuristic, a result of how the brain works. See Blind Brain Theory.

Bakker invented the term "out-of-play illusion" here.

He means the illusion that "If there is no conscious information about how something can differ over time, then that thing is automatically considered to be static, timeless, motionless, etc."

Dogmatic philosophy: start with metaphysical dogmas. Can't find theoretical knowledge.

Kant: dogmatic philosophy is wrong.

• How to explain their failure?
• The knower can't be a passive receiver. The knower must make some "conceptual activity".
• <del>But where is the knower doing the conceptual activity?</del> [Kant couldn't have asked the question because of the illusion of sufficiency. The question never even occurred to him.]
• The conceptual activity is clearly not material, therefore I call it "transcendental".

Russell: The "transcendental realm"? Sounds immovable to me! How could it move? The transcendental realm isn't even spatial!

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions [metaphysics] that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.

Weird disorders like "pain asymbolia" would not be weird if we have some intuitive understanding about how our minds are made. Our intuitive understanding of our own mind says that the mind is whole and free, and such odd behaviors like pain asymbolia and tumor-induced-psychopathy are quite literally unimaginable by our intuitive theory of mind.

If our introspection gives us some "flags" that notify us that our understanding of our own minds is incomplete, then we would be less puzzled. The utter puzzlement comes from the simultaneous conviction that our intuitive Theory of Mind is sufficient and the odd disorders demonstrating that our intuitive ToM cannot be sufficient.

The cognitive illusion of sufficiency meets the material reality of insufficiency.

I'm unable to find any prominent researcher advocating this position, but perhaps:

Does memory encoding exist? (Tulving, 2001)

Socrates invites us to think of the mind as an aviary full of birds of all sorts. The owner possesses them, in the sense that he has the ability to enter the aviary and catch them, but does not have them, unless he literally has them in his hands. The birds are pieces of knowledge, to hand them over to someone else is to teach, to stock the aviary is to learn, to catch a particular bird is to remember a thing once learned and thus potentially known. The possibility of false judgment emerges when one enters the aviary in order to catch, say, a pigeon but instead catches, say, a ring-dove.

Kant's philosophy seemed necessarily true because Kant had philosophical anosognosia. He was blind to the alternative ways to interpret the feelings. He was also blind to this blindness.

Kant's philosophy is based on a rational analysis of the feelings, like sight and sound. After intense introspection, Kant believed that all feelings inherently has dimensions of space and time, therefore space and time are constructed by his subjective self, even if the objects don't have space or time.

Kant was the first critical philosopher, and that meant that when he did his work, he felt like he was doing the one true critical philosophy.

As the years went on, more critical philosophies appeared, and now we can't take any philosophy as seriously as Kant took his own philosophy.

The question is then, why does a philosophy, an interpretation, and similar things, feel sufficient, until someone produces some alternative interpretation and wake up from our trance of sufficiency? Why do ideas sound so great in our own mouths until someone raises questions about it?

Bakker's theory may be compared with that of Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017)

Humans have intuitive physics: things tend to fall to the ground and stay put, unless you kick it. Motion is absolute (contradicting Newtonian physics), and some things are moving (like the sun), others aren't (like the earth).

Humans also have intuitive meta-physics: the subject is passively a receiver of true information about the outside world.

Both of these should be explainable by neuroscience.

Kant wanted to study reason, just like how scientists of his time studied the stars and the heat engines. Kant, unfortunately, had no neuroscience instruments, so he was forced to rely mainly on introspection and philosophy -- not science.

So his study of reason was unscientific, which is why it failed.

Critical philosophy failed. Bryant and the OOO philosophers in general want to do dogmatic philosophy. They will fail too, because humans can't do philosophy well.

Critical philosophy failed, not because it's critical, but because it's philosophy.

Bakker proposes a neuroscientific explanation for why human philosophers are stuck with the two positions of subject first (like Kant and Heidegger) and object first (like those before Kant, and those OOO philosophers).

This is an extended joke, just like metaphysics.

But there is a way out of this joke, and it requires a bit of psycho-philosophy.

dokein: to think,

krinein: to judge, decide, select

Kant: Epistemology before ontology, because we need to think right before we can know stuffs.

Bryant: Ontology before epistemology, because we are made of stuff, and we can't think right if we aren't thinking in the way appropriate to the stuff we are made of.

The reader: How did you know that?

Western philosophy went like this:

• Before Kant, philosophy was done dogmatically, founded on unquestioned assumptions (such as "God exists" "reality remains even if we don't sense it"). This philosophy failed to produce knowledge (unlike the technologists, who produced lots of knowledge).
• Kant critiqued all of philosophy's foundations, and built up a new foundation that (he thought) passed his harsh critique. This philosophy failed to produce knowledge (unlike the technologists, who produced lots of knowledge).
• Now, OOO wants to do some dogmatic philosophy again, this time by devising new and exciting ontologies ("speculative realism"). Maybe everything can think. Maybe nothing can and even humans are just zombies. Maybe... Maybe this time they could produce knowledge.

"family plot" means a graveyard place where a family can be buried in.

Bakker suggests that all the intuitive concepts about consciousness and unconscious -- things like desires, cravings, beliefs, qualias, emotions, moods -- will all be buried by neuroscience, indiscriminately.

The postmodernists like to say they have given up the Cartesian subject, but they kind of haven't. They admit that the Cartesian subject is not in one piece, but made of many pieces, like... intentionality, qualia, etc.

They dress this up with French words like "differance", but that's not radical or scientific enough. They should really deconstruct these concepts -- like intentionality -- too, guided by neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

I have, in fact, tried to write an essay explaining how I come to write the essay without using any concept of intentionality. I failed, but perhaps Bakker can succeed.

This is like Kant's project: apparently he was using rational critique, but he was secretly an apologist protecting God, morality, and other traditionally valued things from rational critique.

Bakker is like an anthropologist visiting a tribe of humans who talk about ghosts. Bakker takes the tribe of Phenomenologists seriously, but not literally. Bakker is going to explain why they are spontaneously seeing ghosts in similar ways, while rejecting the Phenomenologists' own explanation: "Ghosts are real.".

First-person phenomena, like my seeing of an orange, cannot be recorded, reproduced, or even replicated by another person, or even replicated by myself.

In short, first-person phenomena are extremely un-generalizable. How could we then bake phenomenology -- a general theory of consciousness -- from something so ungeneral?

Let's play the game of "But why?"

• The sun is hot.
• But why?
• Because I feel hot on my skin when it's sunny.
• But why is it sunny?
• Because I see a bright orange ball in the sky.

we always end up with talks of simple perceptions. Simple perceptions are those that do not allow us to ask "But why?" further:

• I feel hot on my skin.
• But why?
• I feel hot on my skin! There's no need to explain! It's self-evident and given to me, and I don't need to justify it! Nor can I possibly justify it! There is no way to justify what is given to me!

Husserl claims that "some time passed" is also a simple perception, given to us, self-evident, and cannot be questioned further.

"beetle" is a metaphor for spooky, mysterious things (like "free will") that science cannot explain, but must exist according to introspection.

Even if determinism is false, free will is still not safe, because randomness (imagine a dice-machine in the brain) is also not free will.

Furthermore, psychological experiments and technologies that mess with the brain are here NOW, and these philosophies completely ignore these.

The history of philosophy gave us many ontologies, from idealism to materialism to dualism to solipsism to...

and there has not been a single one that's conclusively rejected.

Robots need to consider their choices and decide which of them leads to the most favorable situation. In doing this, the robot considers a system in which its own outputs are regarded as free variables, i.e. it doesn’t consider the process by which it is deciding what to do. The perception of having choices is also what humans con- sider as free will.

John McCarthy 2000, Concepts of Logical AI

Philosophically, ontology comes before neuroscience.

But scientifically, neuroscience comes before ontology.

Philosophers trust in the first direction, ignoring the second direction. They think that any ontological dispute is resolvable by ontological disputes (and perhaps some political and ethical disputes, just to spice things up), and no brain science is needed. They are wrong.

• "I don't know... How reliable is that?"
• "You don't need to know."
• "But..."
• "Stop wasting your energy on that." [applies brain modifier]
• "Well now I know EVERYTHING that I need to know! Everything I don't know is derivable from them!"

Our introspection is so bad that we can't even introspect the duration of pain. How do we expect that we can introspect other, less visceral aspects like... thinking, consciousness, and such?

Introspection is likely radically unreliable.

Bakker proposes to construct the Ontological Difference (a concept in ontology) with Neuroscience (a theory of certain ontic things). This is a circular construction, since ontic things are defined using the ontology.

But it's the best we could do, since directly constructing ontology without ontic concepts gave us unreadable crap like Heidegger's later books. Humans are just too bad at finding general truths through any route except science.

Heidegger says there is a category mistake (a type error).

being: Ontological

table, chair, atom: Ontic

Therefore, reasoning about being like we reason about tables and chairs is likely wrong.

Ontological Difference Error: 'being' is not an instance of type 'Ontic'

There are two kinds of things: being and beings.

being is an ontological entity. It is existence itself.

beings are ontic entities. They are things like chairs and atoms and electrons.

Any theory of beings is based on some (unspoken) theory about being itself.

The brain is the ontic thing that generates ontology. Neuroscience (the study of the brain) is the necessary and sufficient foundation for ontology.

Can you do ontology using only words that refer to ontological things, and NOT to ontic things?

Or is it necessary to refer to ontic things when you do ontology? If so, what ontic things must you refer to?

Bill Lycan claimed that, even if introspection is a possible kind of perception, it is still pretty weird. If I introspect "I see apple", the only perception is .

Roughly, the reason is that, while external objects, like apples, has perceptible properties like color, reflectivity, taste... the inner objects, like "the awareness of "apple"", cannot have any property.

To introspect, then, is like looking at the sky, and suddenly God directly sends a thought "I see God" into your head by an invisible beam.

It's impossible to directly perceive "I see an ant". It is only possible to directly perceive "ant". It is also possible to directly jump to conclusion (illogically) that "I see an ant".

In short, perceiving "I see X" by direct introspection is impossible. What we claim to be direct introspection is really just jumping from a direct perception "X" to an illogical conclusion "I see X", then pretending that this knowledge is gained by direct introspection.

To see the weirdness, here's an analogy:

1. a direct perception "she is dead"
2. an illogical conclusion "I caused she to be dead"
3. an even more illogical claim "I knew that by direct introspection"

This reminds me of Hrönir from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

It may turn out that these "subjective" perceptions -- hallucinations, hunger, pain, itch, etc -- are secretly objective.

Maybe a hallucination is really a veridical perception of some eye-brain-phenomenon. Then the meaning of a hallucination is just as objective as a sight of an apple. Then, the hallucination cannot allow me to deduce that I'm not a zombie.

So, we have

naive realism + empiricism + I am not a zombie \(\not\to\) I know I am not a zombie

Perceptions about my body is also objective:

• My leg muscles are distended and hot from exertion.
• My leg muscles and their states are objective.
• I can't deduce I'm not a zombie from perception of my leg muscles.

When we are not very introspective, and under normal perception conditions, we only perceive objective things (things that are independent of perception). In this situation, we cannot derive that someone is doing the perceiving, because:

• Apple exists
• Apple is objective.
• If I am a zombie, apple still exists, because apple is objective.
• I might be a zombie.

Mathematically:

• X \(\not \to\) I think "I think X"
• I think "X" \(\not \to\) I think "I think X"

The sight of an apple is an experience. The experience indicates that there is an apple. However, it doesn't necessarily indicate that there is someone experiencing the experience.

When I'm perceiving the world normally, everything I perceive is objective. They exist even if I were not perceiving them.

So I think:

• Apple exists.
• If I am a zombie, then apple exists.
• If I am not a zombie, then apple exists.
• So I can't deduce from "Apple exists" to "I am not a zombie".

In the brain, there is a representation of "sight of son" but not a representation of "representation of "sight of son""

I saw the bird. But the mental picture of the bird does not contain a proof that I saw the picture.

I heard the bird, but the sound of the bird contains no proof that I heard the sound.

Sextus Propertius, (born 55–43 bce, Assisi, Umbria [Italy]—died after 16 bce, Rome), greatest elegiac poet of ancient Rome. The first of his four books of elegies, published in 29 bce, is called Cynthia after its heroine (his mistress, whose real name was Hostia).

Beryl, mineral composed of beryllium aluminum silicate, Be3Al2(SiO3)6, a commercial source of beryllium. It has long been of interest because several varieties are valued as gemstones. These are aquamarine (pale blue-green); emerald (deep green); heliodor (golden yellow); and morganite (pink).

Ancient Greek: ἀγκών • (ankṓn)

1. ankle
2. nook, corner, angle of the wall
3. bend or meander of a river
4. headlands which form a bay
5. ribs which support the horns of the cithara
6. kind of vase

This word occurs only in (Ezekiel 27:11) A variety of explanations of the term have been offered.

1. One class renders it "pygmies."
2. A second treats it as a geographical or local term.
3. A third gives a more general sense to the word "brave warriors." Hitzig suggests "deserters." After all, the rendering in the LXX. --"guards"-- furnishes the simplest explanation.

Gnaeus Julius Agricola, (born June 13, 40 ce, Forum Julii, Gallia Narbonensis—died August 23, 93), Roman general celebrated for his conquests in Britain.

Gaius Suetonius Paulinus was a Roman general best known as the commander who defeated the rebellion of Boudica.

Prasutagus was king of a British Celtic tribe called the Iceni, who inhabited roughly what is now Norfolk, in the 1st century AD. He is best known as the husband of Boudica.

As an ally of Rome his tribe were allowed to remain nominally independent, and to ensure this Prasutagus named the Roman emperor as co-heir to his kingdom, along with his two daughters. Tacitus says he lived a long and prosperous life, but when he died, the Romans ignored his will and took over, depriving the nobles of their lands and plundering the kingdom. Boudica was flogged and her daughters raped.

Because of this, Boudica led an Iceni uprising in 60.

Nero is a Roman emperor, reigned from 54 to 68.

Publius Ostorius Scapula (died 52) was a Roman statesman and general who governed Britain from 47 until his death.

In the winter of 47 he was appointed the second governor of Roman Britain by the emperor Claudius. The Iceni, a tribe based in Norfolk who had not been conquered but allied themselves with the Romans voluntarily, led neighbouring tribes in an uprising. Ostorius defeated them by storming a hill fort in a hard-fought battle. The Iceni remained independent.

Iceni, in ancient Britain, a tribe that occupied the territory of present-day Norfolk and Suffolk and, under its queen Boudicca (Boadicea), revolted against Roman rule.

Roman emperors

1. Claudius: 41 to 54
2. Vespasian: 69 to 79
3. Severus: 193 to 211.

In the middle of the 5th century the Anglo-Saxons, Germanic tribes, invaded Britain. The Anglo-Saxon conquest is regarded as the beginning of medieval history in Britain. The Anglo-Saxons were the ancestors of the English. As a result of the conquest they formed the majority of the population in Britain.

The equites Dalmatae were a class of cavalry in the Late Roman army. They were one of several categories of cavalry unit or vexillatio created between the 260s and 290s as part of a reorganization and expansion of Roman cavalry forces.

Brancaster is a village and civil parish on the north coast of the English county of Norfolk.

Branodunum was an ancient Roman fort to the east of the modern English village of Brancaster in Norfolk. Its Roman name derives from the local Celtic language, and may mean "fort of the raven".

It is a part of the Saxon shore defense system.

The Saxon Shore (Latin: litus Saxonicum) was a military command of the late Roman Empire, consisting of a series of fortifications on both sides of the Channel. It was established in the late 3rd century and was led by the "Count of the Saxon Shore". In the late 4th century, his functions were limited to Britain, while the fortifications in Gaul were established as separate commands. Several Saxon Shore forts survive in east and south-east England.

area

Manes - Wikipedia

In ancient Roman religion, the Manes or Di Manes are chthonic deities sometimes thought to represent souls of deceased loved ones. They belonged broadly to the category of di inferi, "those who dwell below," the undifferentiated collective of divine dead.

The Manes were offered blood sacrifices. The gladiatorial games, originally held at funerals, may have been instituted in the honor of the Manes.

In ancient Roman funerals, an ustrinum was the site of a cremation funeral pyre whose ashes were removed for interment elsewhere. The ancient Greek equivalent was a καύστρα. Ustrina could be used many times. A single-use cremation site that also functioned as a tomb was a bustum.

The population is innumerable; the farm-buildings are found very close together, being very like those of the Gauls.

Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also Bellum Gallicum, is Julius Caesar's firsthand account of the Gallic Wars, written as a third-person narrative. In it Caesar describes the battles and intrigues that took place in the nine years he spent fighting the Celtic and Germanic peoples in Gaul that opposed Roman conquest.

Thomas Witherley - Wikipedia

Sir Thomas Witherley, M.D., b.21 Aug 1618 d.23 March 1693-4, was a doctor of medicine of Cambridge of 1655, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College of Physicians in December, 1644 [1664]. On the 9th April, 1677, being then physician in ordinary to the king, he was admitted a Fellow, and was named an Elect 21st January, 1678-9. He was Censor in 1683; President, 1684, 1685, 1686, 1687; and Consiliarius, 1688 and 1692. Sir Thomas Witherley died 23rd March, 1693-4.

found at Cambridge college alumni search

Thomas WITHERLEY
Approx. lifespan: 1616–1693
Adm. sizar at Gonville & Caius College 1634:04:30
s. of William WITHERLEY gent.
b. 1618:08:21 in the parish of St Peter, Burlingham, Norfolk ,
School, in parish of St Stephen, (? Norwich, [Norfolk], )
Matric. 1634
Scholar 1635-38
B.A. 1637/8
M.A. 1641
M.D. 1655
Probably Master of Sch: Holt Grammar School Holt, Norfolk , 1640-44
Hon. Fellow, R.C.P. 1644 ; Fellow 1677 ; Censor 1683 ; President 1684-87 ; Consiliarius 1688, and 1692
Knighted.
Second physician to James II.
m. Anne GEE at Little Walsingham, [Norfolk], 1655/6:02:03
Referred to by Sir Thomas Browne in Urn Burial as 'my worthy friend, Dr Thomas WITHERLEY of Walsingham, [Norfolk], .'
d. 1693/4:03:23
Will, P.C.C.
father of Hammond WITHERLEY (1670)
father of Thomas WITHERLEY (1672)
( Venn I. 312)

brazen nippers: tools for nipping (aka pliers), made of brass

"To correspond to; to be in harmony with; to be in agreement with."

Walsingham, area in North Norfolk district, Norfolk, England.

Possible interpretation

In regard to the duration, whether of our bodies or our fame, there is so much uncertainty, that those who had most confidently reckoned on it have been disappointed; and even the enjoyment of what we call long duration, seems no more than a mere escape from oblivion.

the "infamy" of human nature is the fact that humans must die and rot in a grave

But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
    to the depths of the pit.

Those who see you stare at you,
    they ponder your fate:
“Is this the man who shook the earth
    and made kingdoms tremble,
the man who made the world a wilderness,
    who overthrew its cities
    and would not let his captives go home?”

Periamma ep̓idermion, or, Vulgar errours in practice censured : also The art of oratory, composed for the benefit of young students

Walker, Obadiah, 1616-1699

Enoch)

according to the non-canonical Book of Jasher), Enoch enjoyed a remarkable horseback ascent into heaven.

Elias

see above; according to the biblical account, he rose to heaven in a whirlwind from the Jordan riverbed.

Gordianus

Gordian III (d.242 AD), Roman Emperor. Some sources implicate his successor Philip in murder, although military defeat by the Persians remains a plausible alternative. In any case, his epitaph

To the deified Gordian, conqueror of the Persians, conqueror of the Goths, conqueror of the Sarmatians, queller of mutinies at Rome, conqueror of the Germans, but no conqueror of Phillipi

was defaced by Licinius (descendant of Philip) who may have hoped to erase the hint of a crime from his pedigree. The five languages to which Browne refers are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Egyptian and Arabic.

Licinius, in full Valerius Licinianus Licinius, (died 325), Roman emperor from 308 to 324.

Jan Gruter or Gruytère, Latinized as Janus Gruterus, was a Flemish-born philologist, scholar, and librarian.

death from

More goods was found on the market than

That would be enough to buy a bonfire

The pitch in which the bodies were cremated

He conducts the rites, and buys the pot.

On Sardanapalus’ Dishonourable life and Miserable Death | sweettenorbull

According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, Sardanapalus was the last of a line of 30 kings of Assyria, who exceeded all his predecessors in his sybaritic way of life. He emulated women in dress, voice, and mannerisms, passing his days spinning and making clothing. According to legend, he was responsible for the downfall of Assyria at the hands of an army of Medes, Persians, and Babylonians headed by Arbaces, a Median chief. Sardanapalus defeated the rebels thrice only to abandon the fight when his besieged royal capital of Ninus was flooded by the Euphrates River in apparent fulfillment of a prophecy. Sardanapalus built a huge pyre of his palace treasures, in which he ordered himself burned to death along with his servants and concubines.

Side note: this story seems very similar to the legend of the death of King Zhou, the last king of Shang Dynasty.

The most powerful kind of omnipotence is the kind that is so powerful that it won't be hurt even by itself.

Everything else is not powerful enough, and thus is killable by something.

which is the peculiar [property] of that necessary essence

"deliver" here mears "rescued", as in Psalm 59

Deliver me from my enemies, O God; be my fortress against those who are attacking me.

Deliver me from evildoers and save me from those who are after my blood.

Mizraim is the Hebrew and Aramaic name for the land of Egypt, with the dual suffix -āyim, perhaps referring to the "two Egypts": Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Mizraim is the dual form of matzor, meaning a "mound" or "fortress," the name of a people descended from Ham.

in Thomas Browne's time, people ate mummy as medicine.

6th century BC, king of Persia (Achaemenid Empire). The eldest son and successor of Cyrus II the Great, the conqueror of Babylon.

Browne thought that ancient Egyptians made mummies (which involved putting dead bodies into sweet-smelling resin) so that the body would be ready for use in the future, when the soul returns.

This is not true.

There is a "world soul", and when we die, our souls merge back to the world soul like a water drop falling into an ocean.

meaning - What does "To weep into stones are fables" mean? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

This refers to the fable of Niobe. She cried so much she turn into stone, and even the stone still cried.

This sentence can be translated as

The capacity of people to metaphorically weep themselves into stones (that is, to abandon themselves so completely to grief that they become as dead to the world of living things as stone is) is a fable (that is, an exaggerated circumstance not to be found in the real world).

"smart" here means "sharp pain"

"even the most hurtful sickness only leaves a short pain on us, soon forgotten"

"pismire" means "ant".

When an ant dies, it emits oleic acid. Other ants would smell it and know that it is dead, and then carry it to some "ant grave" outside the nest and dump it there.

Elephants seem to mourn their dead, though the "elephant graveyard" is probably a myth.

An elephants' graveyard is a place where, according to legend, older elephants instinctively direct themselves when they reach a certain age. According to this legend, these elephants would then die there alone, far from the group. However, there is no evidence in support of the existence of the elephants' graveyard.

2 Samuel 18:33

And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!

Luke 28:17-18

And you will be hated by everyone because of My name. Yet not even a hair of your head will perish.

A few Bible verses said that.

Exodus 12:43, 46

And the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the ordinance of the Passover…, nor shall you break one of its bones.”

John 19:31-35

Therefore, because it was the Preparation Day, that the bodies should not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who was crucified with Him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you may believe.

John 19:36

For these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled, “Not one of His bones shall be broken.”

Psalm 49:9

That he should still live for ever, and not see corruption.

The Greek says

wonderfully made construction

Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews - Book 10

Chapter 11, paragraph 7.

When therefore those that had intended thus to destroy Daniel by treachery were themselves destroyed, king Darius sent [letters] over all the country, and praised that God whom Daniel worshipped, and said that he was the only true God, and had all power. He had also Daniel in very great esteem, and made him the principal of his friends. Now when Daniel was become so illustrious and famous, on account of the opinion men had that he was beloved of God, he built a tower at Ecbatana, in Media: it was a most elegant building, and wonderfully made... Now they bury the kings of Media, of Persia, and Parthia in this tower to this day, and he who was entrusted with the care of it was a Jewish priest; which thing is also observed to this day.

1 Maccabees 13:25-29

Simon sent and took the bones of his brother Jonathan, and buried him in Modein, the city of his ancestors. All Israel bewailed him with great lamentation, and mourned for him many days. 27 And Simon built a monument over the tomb of his father and his brothers; he made it high so that it might be seen, with polished stone at the front and back. 28 He also erected seven pyramids, opposite one another, for his father and mother and four brothers. 29 For the pyramids he devised an elaborate setting, erecting about them great columns, and on the columns he put suits of armor for a permanent memorial, and beside the suits of armor he carved ships, so that they could be seen by all who sail the sea.

1 Maccabees - Wikipedia

The First Book of Maccabees, also known as First Maccabees (written in shorthand as 1 Maccabees or 1 Macc.), is a book written in Hebrew by an anonymous Jewish author after the restoration of an independent Jewish kingdom by the Hasmonean dynasty, around the late 2nd century BC.

Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars, Book One: LXXXIV The Funeral

With the announcement of the funeral arrangements, a pyre was built on the Campus Martius, ...

At the height of the mourning, crowds of foreigners made their laments according to the customs of their various countries, especially the Jewish community (to whom Caesar was a benefactor), whose members flocked to the Forum for several nights in succession.

According to a reddit post,

Caesar got and stayed on the good side of the Jews when he gave them Jerusalem and decreed that they could rule it and build walls around it... This was not because Caesar was a lover of multiculturalism or the Jews. It was advantageous to Caesar to have a people in the east who were friendly to him after the death of Crassus because most of Pompey's power and money was located in the east.

Suetonius, in The Life of Julius Caesar

meaning "Muslim"

Etymologically, the archaic English "mussulman" is derived from the Ottoman Turkish (and earlier Persian) "mosalmun [mosælmɒn] " (look it up here) , which both mean "Muslim". Which probably derived from the Arabic word "Musliman", equivalent to "Muslim" or "Muslimoon" plural of Muslim.

meaning "preferring to be buried in the ground like sediments, than to be burnt up in a fire"

depositure: putting something down (on the ground/in the ground).

absumption: wasting away, consume gradually

In Imperial China, most people's dead bodies were buried without burning.

The living relatives of the dead people would burn paper effigies of things like horses, houses, servants, jewelries, and money (called "joss money"), which is supposed to be received by the dead people in the underworld. This is true even today.

Giovanni Battista Ramusio )July 20, 1485 – July 10, 1557) was an Italian geographer and travel writer.

Though he himself traveled little, Ramusio published Navigationi et Viaggi ("Navigations and Travels"); a collection of explorers' first-hand accounts of their travels. This was the first work of its kind. It included the accounts of Marco Polo, Niccolò Da Conti, Magellan, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and Giosafat Barbaro, as well as the Descrittione dell’ Africa.[5] The description of China contains the first reference in European literature to tea.

people of Balearia islands, near Spain:

1st century BC Greek historian. He is known for writing the monumental universal history Bibliotheca historica, in forty books, fifteen of which survive intact, between 60 and 30 BC.

As he was returning from Troy, Athena hit his ship with a thunderbolt and the vessel was wrecked on the Whirling Rocks. But he escaped with some of his men, managing to cling onto a rock through the assistance of Poseidon. He would have been saved in spite of Athena, but he then audaciously declared that he would escape the dangers of the sea in defiance of the immortals. Offended by this presumption, Poseidon split the rock with his trident and Ajax was swallowed up by the sea.

The philosopher Heraclitus thought that fire is the common element of everything in the universe, in the sense that everything converts to and converts from it in an endless cosmic chemical process.

In particular, the soul is made of fire. A dry and hot soul is virtuous, while a wet and cold soul is not. He also thought that when people get drunk, their souls get damp.

To extinguish completely.

For example, in Odyssey 20.357

ἠέλιος δὲ οὐρανοῦ ἐξαπόλωλε

it means

The sun went out completely.

name given by ancient geographers to several coast-dwelling peoples in different parts of the world and ethnically unrelated.

Not sure which one Thomas Browne meant.

Legend says that Pythagoras studied in Egypt.

« Numa and Pythagoras: The Life and Death of a Myth »:

A tradition strongly anchored in Greco-Roman historiography made King Numa Pompilius, the successor of Romulus and the second king of Rome (715 – 672 bc ), a disciple of Pythagoras of Samos. Pythagoras was one of the ‘ fathers ’ of Greek philosophy, and a true, Presocratic master, who had allegedly lived in the South of Italy, in Croton and then in Metapontum, towards the end of the sixth and the beginning of the fifth century bc . 1 The ancient sources depict Numa as the founder of a range of civil and especially religious institutions which remained fundamental to the organization of Roman society, and his alleged links with the Greek philosopher were supposed to show, at the same time, the Greek origins of a number of Roman institutions and political principles as well as the wisdom of the king and the excellence of his reforms.

Embalming corpses into mummies; putting dead bodies into dry sand and thereby creating sand-dried mummies; no idea what "inclosure in glasses" means -- ancient Egyptians certainly made glasswares, but there was no mummy enclosed in glass.

hearse, or a cart to carry around human corpses.

Hertha - the Teutonic goddess of fertility; later identified with Norse Njord

This describes the Zoroastrian custom of putting corpses on the Towers of Silence. There the corpses decay, without contamination of the soil with the corpses. Carrion birds, usually vultures and other scavengers, would typically consume the flesh and the skeletal remains would have been left in the pit.

• Many things have been said to be "given"
  • sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself.
• For any situation
  • which philosophers analyze
    • in terms of sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections...
  • you can explain it in the framework of givenness.
• This framework of giveness has been a common feature of the major systems of philosophy,
  • including, "dogmatic rationalism" and "skeptical empiricism".
• Few philosophers have been free of it;
  • certainly not Kant,
  • and not even Hegel, who attacked "immediacy".
• Often when one attacks "given", one merely attacks certain kinds of things as not "given".
  • Examples of such kinds of things
    • intuited first principles
    • synthetic necessary connections
• These attacks do not attack "given" itself.
• Some say they attack "the whole idea of givenness", but they are really only attacking sense data.
• They don't really attack "given", because they argue that some things are still "given".
  • For example, physical objects, or relations of appearing.
  • They don't say these things are "given", but they give them all the characteristics of "given". If it walks and quacks like a duck, it is a duck!
• I will really attack "given" itself.
• I begin my attack with an attack on sense-datum theories.

• Any philosopher who has attacked "givenness" agrees that inferring X $\neq$ seeing X
• If "given" referred merely to the observed parts of observed things, or a subset of {observed things}, then everyone would agree that "data" exists.
• Wrong!
• The phrase "the given" as an epistemological jargon assumes a lot of theory behind it.
• I deny that there are "data" or that anything is, in this sense, "given", and I can do it rationally, without going into contradictions or mysticism. I will do it by attacking the theory behind "the given".

Antonin Artaud: The Peyote Dance, (transl. Helen Weaver; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1976)

An account of Artaud's visit to the Tarahumara in the mid-1930s and of his peyote experience. In another text, “La montaña de los signos” [“The Mountain of Signs”], Artaud said the Rarámuri were descended from the lost people of Atlantis, a fictional island described by Plato

he talks about going off with this tribe and doing the peyote ritual and all these other crazy things that happened. Several people have written that he didn’t actually go at all but it was all in his imagination because he was going a bit mad at this point. I think there are some anthropologists that have found evidence of Artaud having had contact with the tribe. He spent time performing these rituals with the Tarahumaras and they came to inform his theatre.

manuscript

a light spear or javelin

Walpurgis Night, an abbreviation of Saint Walpurgis Night, also known as Saint Walpurga's Eve, is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, an 8th-century abbess in Francia, and is celebrated on the night of 30 April and the day of 1 May.

It's from Cap. XXIII, Caius Julius Solinus, "De Mirabilibus Mundi". He's talking about Mount Atlas.

It is entirely silent during the day and, isolated, it arouses horror; it is lit up by nocturnal fires and it echoes everywhere with the choirs of Aegipans; you can hear the singing of flutes and the tinkle of cymbals along the seashore.

Aegipan - Wikipedia

Aegipan (Ancient Greek: Αἰγίπαν, gen. Αἰγίπανος), that is, Goat-Pan, was according to some statements a being distinct from Pan, while others regard him as identical with Pan. His story appears to be altogether of late origin.

Gaius Julius Solinus - Wikipedia

Gaius Julius Solinus was a Latin grammarian, geographer, and compiler who probably flourished in the early 3rd century AD. Historical scholar Theodor Mommsen dates him to the middle of the 3rd century.

Solinus was the author of De mirabilibus mundi ("The wonders of the world") which circulated both under the title Collectanea rerum memorabilium ("Collection of Curiosities"), and Polyhistor, though the latter title was favoured by the author himself. The work is indeed a description of curiosities in a chorographic framework. It contains a short description of the ancient world, with remarks on historical, social, religious, and natural history questions. The greater part is taken from Pliny's Natural History and the geography of Pomponius Mela.

Rupert Street is a street in London's Soho area, running parallel to Wardour Street and crossing Shaftesbury Avenue.

Shaftesbury Avenue is a major street in the West End of London

Wadham College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

And he is the devil incarnate. And is made human.

Oswald Croll or Crollius (c. 1563 – December 1609) was an alchemist, and professor of medicine at the University of Marburg in Hesse, Germany.

The Romans built a lot of roads in their civilizing process. "All roads lead to Rome" as the adage says.

Good resource for some annotation sources: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/hydrionoframes/hydrion.html

Afflicted by the astrological influence of a planet; struck down with amazement or shock.

Same idea as "star-struck".

According to Dante, Hercules is in hell. According to Greek mythology, Hercules is a god of strength.

Homer's Odyssey, Book 11.

Odysseus speaks to Achilles in the underworld, and Achilles says:

I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

[Tibullus, Elegies I, i, 67]. expressing the common popular belief, that excessive grief and crying too much for the dead 'will not let the dead sleep.'

Tu manes ne laede meos, sed parce solutis

Crinibus et teneris, Delia, parce genis.

You ghosts don't hurt me, but spare the weak

Hair and delicate cheeks, Delia, spare.

Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, BOOK VI, CHAPTER 2, DIOGENES (404‑323 B.C.)

There Xeniades once asked him how he wished to be buried. To which he replied, "On my face." "Why?" inquired the other. "Because," said he, "after a little time down will be converted into up."

Bye, bye, let us follow you, in the order that nature allows.

Periander was an tyrant of Corinth (died c. 585 BC).

There was a legend about Periander recorded in Herodotus' History He accidentally killed his wife Melissa in a fit of rage. He then had sex with the corpse.

Later,

Periander had sent messengers to the Oracle of the Dead at the river Acheron in Thesprotia to find out where a dead friend had hidden his treasure. Instead of a receiving a location, the messengers were astonished by the ghost of Melissa, who told them that she would never reveal the location of the treasure because she had received an ungracious and improper burial.Her ghost was cold and naked because Periander had not burned her clothes but buried them with her corpse, where they were or no use to her ghostly self. In order to prove the validity of her spectral utterance, Melissa told the messengers that "Periander had put his loaves into a cold oven" (Hdt. 5.92G).

When Periander received this message, he knew it to be true, for only the ghost of his dead wife could have known that. In response to this message, and in order to appease his dead wife and find the location of the lost treasure, Periander gathered all of the Corinthian women at the temple of Hera. There he stripped them all of their clothes, casting their garments into a pit. Periander then burned the clothes while in prayer to Melissa. Upon this, he sent messengers to the oracle again, and having appeased Melissa, was told the location of the buried treasure. However, we are not told the importance of this treasure, or indeed whose exactly it was.

Dante's Purgatorio, Canto 23:

Their sockets were like rings without the gems;

Whoever in the face of men reads 'omo'

Might well in these have recognised the 'm.'

Pseudo-Phocylides - Wikipedia

Pseudo-Phocylides is an apocryphal work, at one time, claiming to have been written by Phocylides, a Greek philosopher of the 6th century BC. Its authorship was deciphered by Jacob Bernays (in the 1800s). The text is noticeably Jewish, and depends on the Septuagint, although it does not make direct references to either the Hebrew Bible or Judaism. Textual and linguistic studies point to the work as having originally been written in Greek, and having originated somewhere between 100BC and 100AD.

The apocryphal work is "The sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides", which was claimed to be by Phocylides, to make it seem more credible. Back then, old books were automatically considered more credible, simply for being old.

[Pseudo-Phocylides, Sententiae 103-104] Translation from THE SENTENCES OF PSEUDO‐PHOCYLIDES . By Walter T. Wilson:

97 Weaken not your dear heart sitting in vain by the fire.
98 Make moderate your lamentations, for moderation is best.
99 Reserve a share of earth for the unburied dead.
100 Do not dig up the grave of the deceased, nor reveal
101 what may not be seen to the sun and incite divine wrath.
102 It is not good to dismantle a human frame.
103 And we hope, too, that quickly from the earth to the light will come
104 the remains of the departed; and then they become gods.
105 For souls remain unscathed in the deceased.
106 For the spirit is a loan from God to mortals, and is Gods image.
107 For we possess a body out of earth; and then, when into earth again
108 we are resolved, we are dust; but the air has received our spirit.

In the book, there is the following commentary:

Verses 103-104. This is one of the few sections of the poem that clearly reveals its Jewish origins. While tales of resuscitated corpses were not unknown in the Greco-Roman world, belief in the physical resurrection of the dead was a distinctive tenet of Judaism and Christianity. Of particular interest are texts that, like Pseudo-Phocylides, anticipate the exaltation of the resurrected, such as Dan 12:2-3 ("Many of those who sleep in the dust shall be raised, some to everlasting life ... and the wise will shine as the brightness of the firmament, and many of the righteous as the stars forever.") and Luke 20:35-36 ("Those who are considered worthy of a place ... in the resurrection from the dead ... are like angels and are children of God."). In his survey of Jewish texts that treat the afterlife, Hans Cavallin identifies as a recurring motif descriptions that liken the risen righteous to "stars, angels, and other heavenly bodies or beings." 3 3 Given that such beings were generally understood to be divine in nature, 3 4 Pseudo-Phocylides' use of Oeoi in this context is not altogether surprising, probably referring in the first place to the status the resurrected will enjoy as immortals; cf. w. 105 (note the yap) and 115. 3 5 What is surprising is that, for our author, resurrection appears to have no judiciary function or aspect whatsoever, as it does in most all Jewish or Christian writings that express this hope. The text projects a scenario in which the remains of all people, not just the worthy, are deified

During the winter, celestial bodies move across the sky with smaller arches, so they rise later and set earlier.

The angular distance of an object, measured along the celestial equator, from the point on the equator which sets with the object in a right sphere.

It's related to the right ascension.

"sue": to continue, to persevere. This meaning is still preserved in "pursue".

Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full.

Who knows what is the mid-point between the creation and end of the world?

After the Flood of Noah, humans' lifespan got greatly shortened to around 70 years old. Before the Flood of Noah, humans often lived for over 100 years. Methuselah in particular lived over 900 years.