Ramification in Causality is meaningless lie of the human

We don’t know what a fact is, so all we can do is investigate. Such a presupposition, directive of the seeking, would exclude the possiblity of genuine investigation. One could say, we seek the truth about the fact, though, there too, we make a difficulty. Since we don’t know what truth is. Ergo, we enter the hermeneutic circle with as much openness as possible only guided by the subject matter of the fact itself.

So if someone is a “joker” then we can dismiss his claim about facts? In other words, the modern objection and universal cheep escape clause: “ad hominem” must be wholly set aside. How do we, however, know when we have a “joker” on our hands?

Here there is a distinction to be made between expert opinion of scientists, and Scientific facts. The latter relies on the accuracy of quantifiable demonstration. Which, in the case of a one-time future event, can only be given ,at best, probabilistically. Strictly speaking, no scientific fact can be given here concerning future happening.

Fact is opposed to law there. I.e., interpretation or construal of the law. Accessory after the fact means: after the act. Act means a voluntary, ergo, a culpable deed.

What is fact? One thing or many?

The group considers this answer unworthy. The group finds the group answering in empty rhetoric, unworthy of answer. This does not impress the group as an account of what was said, or what is happening in any serious sense.

If the group does not know that words mean something, it is at too low a level to discourse. The group is not paid to swaddle babies, or struggle without being paid with elements of the group who prefer idiocy to intelligence.

The group considers the depreciatory use of the word scholastic as a form of thoughtlessness. It indicates something wholly unknown is being discussed by the group, on the basis of a freighted reception of dumb stupidity derived from authority, and therefore something peculiarly unassailable and unavailable to intelligence and group discussion.


Can the group state the distinction being raised here? The group does not find this obvious. Squirrels make noises, humans make noises. The noise seems to do something. How does one show the difference?

My goal [these days] is ever and always the same:

When someone notes things like…

Because of the issue in Dostoevsky’s Devils. The freedom to interpret (the either / or) comes up against the stone, the man-god is not wholly sublime. Ergo, not wholly superior to the terrible and unpleasant forces which show him how little he is worth.

…all I am basically interested in is the extent to which this point reflects some measure of human autonomy. And, if it does, what are the existential implications germane to that which is of most interest to me: how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods?

Now, if “human freedom” here is essentially a self-delusion rooted in a mind rooted in a brain rooted in laws immutably applicable to all matter, then nothing that any of us post here was ever going to be anything other than that which it could only ever have been: what in fact it is. Period.

Then we go from there to whatever brought into existence the existence of existence itself.

But [admittedly] part of my psychology [rooted in dasein] has predisposed [driven] me to pursue polemics. And part of this is “fun” in the sense that deconstructing objectivists is “entertainment” for me.

Some of these folks have spent literally years constructing these complex and convoluted “intellectual contraptions”. Things like “value ontology”. Then they bump into me and I start in on tinkering with them. Maybe even take them apart.

And we all know the manner in which some of them react to that.

Then to me.

Why do I do this?

Well, there’s this:

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

And [no doubt] there’s the part revolving around the fact that I no longer have access myself to the “psychology of objectivism”. I am no longer able to sustain the sort of “comfort and consolation” embedded in that frame of mind convinced it is in touch with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

So – consciously? subconsciously? unconsciously? – I have come to truly envy those who still do. And there’s a part of me that goes after this.

But that’s just the sort of speculation built into “I” here as an existential contraption. I can never really know for certain what makes “me” tick here. There are far too many pieces [going all the way back to my birth] hopelessly entangled in far too many contexts that are surely beyond either my complete understanding or my control.

What I do however is to suggest that this sort of thing – the fractured and fragmented “I” – is applicable to all of us. Some are just more aware of it than others.

Unless of course I’m wrong. But how [using the tools of philosophy] would I or others go about establishing that?

…………………………………………

On the other hand, some of the stuff that folks like Guide write here borders on gibberish to me. It’s so fucking unintelligible at times I’m thinking that maybe he/she really is just putting me on. Just yanking my chain.

So, sure, the joke may well be on me.

The Joker is essential in a monarchy and tasked with reminding the king of his mortality lest he become too full of himself. The king wanted a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity, so the jeweler inscribed “It shall pass”. :slight_smile:

It’s fun to discover how one ought to live because invariably it’s discovered that one ought to live in a way that is fun, otherwise what is the purpose of living? “Fun” is just a placeholder for the purposeless.

Laws? That’s an objective thing, right? Laws require an authority to enforce, but what happens in nature just happens and if it happens regularly, we presuppose they are laws. If the universe is inherently random and we rewind it to the beginning, it would almost certainly unfold in some other way. It’s the lack of purpose that gives the universe purpose. If everything had a purpose; a destiny; a determination, then what would the purpose be for having the show? It would be a fatuous waste of energy and much easier to have had nothing.

But is that really fun or vanity? Or is vanity fun? Is playing the game fun or is winning fun because that’s part of a larger game?

Yes it’s never fun to be wrong.

If you truly feel there is no “right thing to do”, then what you do cannot be predicated on what is “right”. You just do what you do because that is what you do. Self reflection on the matter is taking an engineering view of the universe that everything must have a purpose.

At least you can articulate the problem!

I don’t understand his talking in the 3rd person, but I suppose that is just what Guide does.

Fact is whatever you want it to be because fact is the consensus of your opinion. You are the source of authority for all information that you buy.

What is genuine investigation? What is genuine anything?

How the heck did you learn a word such as hermeneutic? lol

The truth about the truth is there is no truth and that’s a fact! :wink:

Is there a way to differentiate whether the joker lies or speaks truth?

This reminds me of those logic problems from school that this man is a lair and this man tells the truth, so what question would you ask to determine which is which? But the joker is neither wholly a liar nor speaker of truth.

Repeatable demonstration doesn’t guarantee anything. If you flip a coin 1,000,000 times and always get heads, that doesn’t mean you won’t get tails the next time. The authority ultimately relies upon you… are you going to believe the demonstration or not?

No, what I meant was the jury would decide things that are not a matter of law, such as whether certain evidence is fact. If a cop doesn’t use his radar to gauge your speed, but paces your car with his car instead, is that valid evidence of a crime? Someone has to decide if the evidence is fact or opinion.

To iambiguous:

Regarding the quote about Dostoyevski. I have an answer for you, by way of some lines from a poem from a movie I really liked. “Do not go silently into the night!”

If these cruel forces exist, and are bigger than you, fight them to the death. Make some noise. Meekness is a self evident dead end.

Investigation guided by the subject matter itself rather than a preconceived aim.

The group says this is unworthy of answer, due to being too flippant and lacking in substance.

The group says, that is a matter one might investigate. In the group’s experience, often this is possible. One can do it with respect to one’s own views. At first, would the issue be the question of whether the truth is spoken,where truth is said in contradistinction to a interested deception or lie?

The group says this is true, but decidedly off piste. The issue the group raises is the distinction between reliable repeatability and expert commentary without reliable repeatability. Is the group claiming to reject certain findings on the basis of doubts about the regularity of nature and thereby, of inductive reliance?

Whether the actions alleged truly took place is a question about the opinion (of the jurors) concerning the truthfulness or falsity of the testimony. The deeds themselves are not either fact or opinion. They are true or false.

Since they are one time events they can not be tested, and are never facts in the sense of scientific facts: of what is reliable and repeatable concerning what happens when given conditions or circumstances are present.

The older and the recent scientific meaning of fact (action), and fact (demonstrable reliability) are blurred in our time.

Sadly there is no consensus on THIS opinion. Some believe this, some do not.

This is a wrong attribution. That was a citation of another group member. Already somewhat discussed above. Stemming from the first page of this thread.

Well, what is the subject matter itself? That’s subject-ive, no? So what is genuine?

I am unworthy :bow-blue: Authority? Who are you to say there is no substance? :wink:

This is serious business here! No flippancy lest ye be making thine appointment with the gallows on the morrow! :royalty-king:

There is no truth because there is no abstract existence for it to exist. Truth is a concept that exists as a property of another concept. Truth is something conveyed and discerned (subject / object).

It is raining.

I look outside and indeed it is raining, so the statement is true.

It is raining.

I look outside and it is not raining, so the statement carries no truth.

The statement is the same in both cases but only carries truth relative to discernment. It’s like the emission and reception of a photon being the same event and likewise the emission of truth and reception of truth is the same event. There is no abstract truth just like there is no abstract photon.

Truth with respect to one’s own views is not necessarily truth.

There is no objective distinction. Repeatability carries no more weight than expert commentary. In science, no matter how well substantiated your theory is, it will always be a theory. You could measure the speed of light 1000 times and all you can say is “I measured light 1000 times and got c each time.” You can’t say the speed of light is always and forever c. So it doesn’t matter if you repeat the experiment a million times or rely on expert commentary because no objective claim can ever be made.

The only regularity is change. If you assert regularity as objective and eternal, then it’s abstract and not relational and therefore not included in our universe. But if regularity is a part of this universe, then it’s relational and codependent and therefore in constant state of flux or change (a regularity is itself part of a larger regularity and therefore becomes irregular).

You’re still assuming that repeatability lends credibility for the substantiation of scientific fact as superior to a consensus of opinion. Repeatability is still your opinion that repeatability will continue to be repeatable and a cacophony of fuddy-duddies in accord that such regularity exists is no different from a jury or any other consensus of opinion on any other matter; fact is merely consensus of opinion.

I think it’s a terrible mistake and profound malpractice to ardently regard scientific fact as truth or law which could only rely upon authority to enforce because it reduces science to religion minus the god. The first law of science is: there are no laws! There are only observed regularities that may stop being regular at any moment and we have no reason to believe otherwise.

The group learns, the group is clearly not concerned about attributions, but with questioning.

Note to others:

Back again to this: Is “the group” here just a device used to expose those that I too am exposing in my own rendition of Will Durant’s “epistemologists”?

What do you think? Should we take him literally? Seriously? Are you convinced that he really does believe what he thinks he means about “the group” here?

Or, sure, is this all just another excursion into pedantry? And is that meant to be ironic as well?

Otherwise…

It’s just more scholastic gibberish in my view. Sure, go to the dictionary and look up the definition [the meaning] of “concept”. Read philosophers down through the ages in order to assess what “the great minds” have concluded [logically, epistemologically] about human “concepts”.

But sooner or later these technical skills are going to be assigned the task of assessing the extent to which “Ramification in Causality is meaningless lie of the human” as an abstract argument is in sync with human autonomy out in a world where concepts like “freedom” and “justice” precipitate ferocious moral and political conflagrations.

To speak of “freedom” and “justice” as concepts revolves around this:

“A concept is a mental abstraction which allows generalization and the extension of knowledge from some known objects to others unknown. It integrates two or more particulars into a common mental unit.”

But take this abstraction out into the world and we’ll find some who assume they are choosing autonomously to allow women the right [the freedom] to abort their unborn babies while others assume they are choosing autonomously to allow all unborn babies the right [the freedom] to live.

What then does “freedom” and “justice” mean here from the perspective of the “serious philosopher”? And how “for all practical purposes” are actual flesh and blood human beings to make the most of these concepts when their values do come into conflict?

The group found the group’s intervention tl and dr. It noticed an unpleasant pedantry in the first lines. So maybe it was just that.

Of course “fun” here [in an essentially meaningless No God world] is no less an existential contraption. What is construed to be “fun” for one particular “I”, may well be anything but “fun” for another.

So we are still faced with estsablishing rules of behavior in any particular human community such that these rules become the existential embodiment of one or another complex combination of 1] right makes might 2] might makes right and 3] moderation, negotiation and compromise.

Which, from my frame of mind, are embedded historically and culturally in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

But then this part:

Yes, this is one way in which to think about it. But there are hundreds and hundreds of other ways in turn. And, to the best of my knowledge, none of us are able to demonstrate that 1] their own assessment reflects an optimal understanding of the “human condition” or that 2] their assessment here and now is in fact the embodiment of an autonomous freedom to choose this assessment over any other.

How on earth could I possibly discern with any degree of precision where one stops and the other begins? If I construe “I” here as a propoundly problematinc existential contraption, there seems to be no way in which I can get around this. No way in which to acquire an objective understanding of my own motivations and intentions. That would seem to be all scrambled up in the enormously complex interplay of all the variables from all the experiences I have ever had/known going back to my birth.

Even if someone were hired to videotape my entire life from then to now there would still be any number of factors that would be missed.

And yet, over and again, I note that even this assumption is no less an existential contraption. There may well be the right thing to do. There may well be a God. There may well be a deontological philosophical assessment out there that I have just not come across yet. There may well be a way to determine if this exchange itself is only ever as it could have been.

Instead, I take a particular subjective/subjunctive leap [from day to day] on a particular trajectory, presuming some measure of autonomy, and I live my life stumbling about amidst so much that I either do not know or cannot know.

And then the part about oblivion.

One might could say, “genuine” is a modified conception of the search guided by logos simpliciter. Since the logos type has come to doubt his own ground, that of reason or speech that makes sense, amidst the raging of the last man through the essence of his being. Ergo, reason also admits passion and prejudice amidst the pervading nescience.

The talk of “subjective” presupposes an infallible knowing ground where such determinations are drawn out. Ergo, it is thoughtless if taken as more than a momentary means of the investigation.


This is known since before Plato. It’s Socrates theory of anamnesis applied to “rock, stone or mud”, however, one should recall that this was not done in antiquity, and never taken seriously until the Enlightenment as a subject of study. The group must read the seventh letter, there, is insistence on the reality of the ideas, which are no abstractions. Perhaps one might say: they are the human being, so far as the human being is involved in the adventure of knowing and thinking.


The group says, the group may say much, that if an intelligent man said it, would matter, without saying a thing it understands. Just as one can use a computer with no insight into the fundamental sciences that brought it into being. The many: they say much, much that if a thoughtful one said it would be worthy, and understand nothing. The argie-bargies of common birds, when the rara avis chrips them, bound further.


The group says, one must have lived five minutes to appreciate the distinction raised. To see it. This is what is raised. The vague thing seen. Not some ultimate defense of it. The group spends too much time displaying its learnedness, concerning points that are wholly commonplace, and thereby avoids following what is raised in the investigation.

The group perpetually uses the word “objective” as a crotchety crutch. The group would appreciate a rethinking of what it means, in speech that makes sense, followed after it, after a comma, when it is used, if it must be.


Then the group admits to talking nonsense concerning its view of Climate Change. The group wastes time on such clowning. Besides, change itself is an “abstract” conception. What does “abstract” mean here? This group is perhaps meaning to produce bad academic jokes, but not good paths for essential thought? Through its endless spite?


Yes, everyone assumes so. Even the group member who wrote that which this now answers. Though, it is also true, all who reflect, can grasp the problem of induction. The group must grasp statement as what shows, as apart from theoretical assertion.

The group would include reality, what one does do, how one lives, into the path, rather than only reflection and theory. Which, again, is not to say reflection and intellect are not real and most alive. Or, that the group knows what they are.

The group is not aiming at propounding the truth, as if rising above opinion, but rather in showing what can be seen. Ergo, several conceptions of fact exist, the group looks at them, rather than raising them as candidates for election. Remembering, they are not only conceptions, but are in life being lived out.

This group answer, it seems, would, show its heart’s center of haughty contemptuousness to the group, & repine in the planetary intellectual anarchy which claims the anarchy is merely a “sideline” of its main road, which, however, is only dreamed to exist. What more does justice say than: this city, where I live, is the center of the cosmos?

Ah, the pseudo-serious philosopher! :wink:

The group says, the answer given is gravely serious. One should learn to speak simply, and actively avoid being complicated. Ergo, what is written “What more does justice say than: this city, where I live, is the center of the cosmos?” lets the essence of the issue be seen.

One can explicate thusly: All human beings, individuals, are part of groups. The groups have peculiar patterns of life. Each favors their own. No way has been shown out of this, especially considering the failure to universalize the Western notion of reason, as a god or way to divine god’s will.

Okay, so how does “one” and/or “the group” connect the dots between that and this:

Only this time [to placate me] bring these points down out of the scholastic clouds and connect them to an existential context out in the world of conflicting goods.

A context most here are likely to be familiar with.