Ramification in Causality is meaningless lie of the human

Not what I meant by pragmatism, this ground has been covered. More posting where you describe me using ideas that have nothing to do with me. More sticky paper. Nothing new. No showing you can consider other possibilities. No revision.

I don’t think she ought to. I wish she would. (here, me AGAIN, having to remind you that I am a non-objectivist.)

I’m not interesting in figuring out what she or I ought to have done. I have no tools to do that and I don’t think an answer exists. I might be wrong, but I have no way, as far as I can tell to find out. You seem not to either. This is old ground. Rehashing your positions as if it somehow indicates I have a contraption. More sticky paper where I have to re-explain. Not going to anymore.

Sigh. It certainly seems like it is troubling for you to keep saying these same things and to keep trying to find answers you can’t find. I seem to be less troubled by non-objectivism than you are. Sure. But I am not less troubled because of a contraption. I have offered other options here. Nothing new on your part here.

Fine, that’s what the word means to you. Great. But that’s you, not me. I have made it really clear that what I meant by pragmatism was me simply noting that I do things to achieve what I want. And you are off in the clouds of radical abstraction, finding a way for that word to be connected to contraption in you. Your own defnition, finding contraptoins in you. Nothing to do with me.

I have no need for a contraption there.

Precisely. Because they lack the ability to make contraptions. eVerything you said here merely supports my point. They don’t get into holes like yours because they simply cannot sit around mulling over things like that. And they have no contraption telling them they should. YOu seem to. Contraptions are necessary for holes. They are not necessary when there is a lack of hole. This has now been passed between us many times. We never need mention it again.

More opportunities WHERE YOU might get all twisted up in your mind and think abstractly about yourself, because that is how YOU react to non-objectivism. For me having an active life does something different.

You’re not coming with anything new. You can’t seem to admit that what I called pragmatism has nothing to do with soothing me. You can’t seem to admit that non-contraption differences between us might be the cause of my not feeling so fragmented. You cannot even consider the possibility that you have some contraption that makes you obsess over this issue and feel fragmented.

We react differently to non-objectivism. It seems like you experience yourself as more fragmented than me. You conclude over and over that this means I have a contraption. I don’t. I have offered other possible reasons why you might obsess over this while I do not. You have no arguments to dismiss these and just keep repeating yourself.

From here on out I am going to ignore much more of what you say in my responses. I want it to be clear that this is not me unable to respond to the points you make, but simply tired of repeating what has already been said and responded to and not wanting to deal with what I am starting to call the sticky paper.

What new do you have to say?

Okay, not that she ought to, but that in order for the outcome to be more to your liking, she chooses to behave more in sync with your own behaviors.

Still, from my frame of mind, these choices are no less in sync with the components of my own moral philosophy here. Something you tell her predisposes her to change her behavior. But, with another, it may not have been effective at all. It would be you that would have to change your behavior or the conflict would go on.

Objectivists [the right makes might folks] would be adament: my way or the highway. Why? Because my way is the right way. Or it might come down to someone [in the might makes right crowd] simply exercising his power to effectively create a “solution” in sync with that power.

At best, using moderation, negotiation and compromise, a give and take proposal can save the day. But the assumptions I make regarding how that works don’t go away.

Or so [here and now] it seems to me.

You note…

Again, as I see it, your “contraption” here revolves around the manner in which [from my frame of mind] you have come – existentially – not to be as bothered as I am that any behaviors agreed upon are still no less entangled in the assumptions that I make down in my hole.

Basically, this part:

Had either of your lives been different you may well be pushing each other from the opposite end of the moral and political spectrum. But they weren’t different and you are both what you became given the existential trajectory of your lives. And that’s good enough for both of you.

Then this part:

As though there is really nothing more that I can say that might tug you down into the hole with me. Or nothing more that you can say that might yank me up out of it.

Perhaps because I have come to think myself into a hole that you have not.

And I look for the answers that others give here when confronting conflicting goods because my own are no less existential contraptions.

There might actually be answers. If, for example, as some here insist, there is a God.

All I can do is to note the answers that others have come up with.

Right?

I guess what intrigues me in particular here is how exasperated I seem to make you at times. If all these things that you assert about me are true, why not just chalk me up as a lost cause and move onto others.

My suspicion is that there is a part of you that wonders if what I am suggesting here re conflicting goods might not be applicable to you too. Then what? What then of your ability to feel less fractured and fragmented than “I” am?

That sort of thing is construed by me as just another rendition of this:

“I have told you how I think about these relationships but you don’t seem to agree that it makes more sense than how you think about them.”

Still, you are someone convinced “here and now” that there is no objective morality [as I am], yet you do not feel fractured and fragmented in confronting conflicting goods. Why Not?

Your option then is to bring your “pragmatism” here down to earth and try to describe your thoughts and feelings pertaining to an actual context involving conflicting value judgments; or to simply insist that you have already done this and that the problem here is my failure to grasp how this works for you.

Then give up on me and move on.

And, if that’s what you decide, fine. No hard feelings on my part. I’ve enjoyed our exchanges. You think and feel about these relationships as I wish that I could. All I am doing here [polemics aside] is trying genuinely to understand how you have managed to convince yourself of what you believe. Because “I” cannot.

Whatever that means.

Perhaps that’s because I am not inside your head when you encounter situations in which others challenge your value judgments.

AGAIN: All you can here then do is to cite examples of this given your own capacity to go out into the world and interact with others.

Really, try this. See if it might stimulate something “new” from me.

Sure, that can happen. Nothing you say here goes against what I see and experience. That’s life as I know it. I certainly hope I haven’t given the slightest impression I always get what I want. Hardly.

As I’ve said before objectivists use moderation, negotiation and compromise ALL THE TIME. So do I. And non-objectivists can have a might wins, so have might attitude. Not sure what this has to do with the present topic, however.

I was never as bothered by it. I don’t have a contraption or a ‘contraption’. I love the shift to ‘contraption’, with the citation marks. LOL.

I gave this example elsewhere, but let’s look at your behavior in a different context. A person who cares very little about how one ought to live but is in a hole about mortality - his own death and the deaths of those he loves - and spends his time online challenging religious people of different stripes to prove there is an afterlife. This guy in his different from your hole hole notices your threads and thinks

Oh, this guy, iambiguous, must have a contraption. He should be focused just on the fact that we die and there’s no reason to believe in afterlives, but he is obsessing over morals. He should be in my hole.

(and just because you once in a while mention upcoming death, you do it just a tiny percentage of the time. To someone in the mortality hole you obsession with how one ought to live will seem odd, that you are not giving the more important issue more weight will seem odd to him)

Or the person in another kind of existentialist hole. The one yearnign for love and real friendship, intimacy. He sees you focused on morals and thinks, oh, that iamb, he must have a contraption, why isn’t he in my hole. He must have a soothing contraption about not needing love or closeness otherwise he would give MY HOLE the weight it deserves.

IOW you think a contraption must be present if someone is not in your hole. Either the person not in your hole is an objectivist, or they are a non-objectivist with some other contraption that soothes them. But to people in other holes, you will seem to have contraptions, since you give so much weight to morals, rather than mortality, or rather than the impossility of true intimacy and love. The reason you are in your hole and not their holes may have nothing to do with contraptions, it might have to do with temperment, experiences, current situation, personality…

You know, I think you are incapable of actually understanding what I am getting at here. You are oddly clueless for such a smart guy. I think it has taken me a long time to understand that functionally you aredumber than you are. I still find it a fascinating mystery. But it is no longer fascinating enough.

And when I say you are obtuse or clueless, this does not mean about dasein, etc. Nor does it mean you should do what I do or have some contraption that I do not have. When I say you are clueless it has to do with how hard it is for you to NOT take every response I make as me trying to prove your fundamental position is wrong. It has to do with you’re not even considering that your behavior, which I am obviously focusing on, is the issue rather than your nihilism. It is to do with you OBVIOUSLY considering your own reaction to non-objectiivism as the default one other should have, but then denying you think this, then behaving as if it is, then denying it, then contradicting it.

Your cluelessness utterly astounds me. Because it stands in contrast to what you are capable of on occasion. So, I have been drawn in time and again to probe this. Can he really not understand what I meant`?

Not, can he really not understand that I am right and he should feel less fragmented.

See, I have to say things like that because you always CONVENIENTLY (though not consciously) misinterpret. Oh, he is telling me I should do what he says, take on his contraptions. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I am telling you your communication is so limited it is truly unbelievable.

Honestly, no polemics here, this morning I woke up and had a moment of fear that I had been communicating with a Turing program and hadn’t realized it. I don’t say that to insult you. I mean, there is this eerie odd experience of you always interpreting everything into a couple of potential interpersonal acts. 1) I am telling you you are wrong about the effects of dasein. 2) I am trying to convert you. 3) What I am presenting to you is a contraption I think you should take on.

So often I wonder things like…how can he possibly not understand the topic of what I wrote, me now having reworded it 8 times? How could he possibly not have understand, since I quote his behavior, referred to the quote, called it behavior in a specific context, that I was not saying his nihilism was wrong?

Utterly astounded. Curiosity gets the cat stuck in sticky paper.

I’m not trying to tug you out.

Finally, thank you. Yes, that’s possible. (and then below, astoundingly, you go back to assuming I have a belief or contraption again, after here saying it is possible that the difference between us might depend ON YOUR THINKING, your own contraptions. Unbelievable. It’s like you have a split personality.)

Good question. I find it utterly fascinating how obtuse a smart person can be. I honestly can’t believe it. It is a mystery. And this mystery had kept me coming back to be stunned over and over how badly you misinterpret and how much you assume.

Well, obviously that is your interpretation. That interpretation fills EVERY POST AND EVERY RESPONSE. I would have to be clueness not to have noticed that that is perhaps THE DOMINANT PATTERN you have when encountering anyone. Which would be fine, if it was open to revision. Or if you could see that your own philosohpy - dasein et al - indicates other possibilities which are just as likely.

It seems utterly impossible for you to actually MULL over what it would mean to you if you encountered someone who was a non-objectivist but despire not having a contraption is not in your hole. It would seem likely that scares you.

Because you cannot for one second explore what that would mean to you.

Yes, it is construed by you that way. But I don’t think differently about them. You often tell me I do.

You know why you do? Becaues I am not in your hole. So, it has to be that way. If I point out that you are saying it is inevitable that everyone will react like you. You snort with indignation. But then you go right back assuming it over and over despite a complete lack of evidence AND other very liklely possibilities.

I know it would be scary to think you have a contraption that makes you obsess about the hole. But there are other interpretatoins where neither of us has a contraption. I can only assume those threaten you also.

LOL, asking me again

That’s my option? No. There are a number of options.

You are asking me for a contraption. You are asking what contraption I use to not feel bad like you do. If you are the one with the contraption, and that is the difference between us, then I obviously can’t do that. LOL

If it is your temperment to withdraw and fall into this hole or holes in general that is the source of the difference since I don’t have that - another possibility - then I have no contraption to offer you.

There are other possibilities, as I have said, not invovling contraptions on my part.

Even though you admit above your hole may be created by your own thinking, here you are again asking for my contraption.

Yes. We agree on that.

There you go again. You’re being an ass here. Polemics aside. You keep making an assumption that I believe something that makes me feel better about conflicting goods, dasein and all those implications. You keep making that assumption. Even after denying you make that assumption, you go back to that assumption. Even after saying it is not inevitable, you go back to acting like it is.

And you are a smart guy. It utterly amazes me. Truly utterly amazes me that after all this time, with all the different ways I have explained other possiblities. Sometimes in anger, sometimes calmly.

And you keep coming back to me having a contraption.

As a parting note…consider what would be scary about me not being in a hole AND not having a contraption. I can only assume there must be something scary about that.

You didn’t understand. But nice passive aggressive way of putting that on me.

[/quote]
But it didn’t. In fact, things got worse.

Sticky paper, goodbye.

No, my point still revolves more around the extent to which, had your life or her life been different, you might both have come existentially to want different things. Preferences here are still entangled in the manner in which I construe meaning of “I” as rooted in dasein rooted in a particular sequence of experiences.

And not in the narrative that objectivists prefer: the real me in sync with the right thing to do.

And while we both reject that frame of mind [here and now] it is clearly in different ways. For me “I” here is basically an existential contraption embedded [re the future] in contingency, chance and change. For you [as I understand you here] the future will be what it is but you will dwell less on the part about how it would be or could be very different given a different sequence of experiences, relationships and access to ideas.

Yes, many will embrace democracy and the rule of law as the best of all possible worlds, but are still convinced that they ought to be in power because their moral narrative and political agenda does in fact reflect the most rational and virtuous of human interactions.

And the “present topic” for me always comes down to the extent that any particular individual defending any particular value judgment in any particular context feels more or less fragmented in so doing.

Then back to “contraptions”:

You assert this. Again. And you claim to have given me examples of how this “works” for you “for all practical purposes” re your own encounters with conflicting goods.

And all I can point out [again] is that what worked for you then does not resonate for me now.

Then [from my frame of mind] straight back up into the clouds…

All I can do here is to try to figure out what you mean by these words defining and defending other words. They’re not connected to any particular context in which your “I” is confronting the values of another “I” insisting that their behaviors are more rational and virtuous than yours.

In particular [for us] when both are non-objectivists.

Then this part:

The part where I become the argument. I am unable to grasp your own own frame of mind because I am simply not capable of it. Probably because I am not smart enough to. Thus allowing you to “expose” me to everyone here as that “lost csuse”.

Whereas from my frame of mind, seeing our exchange as the embodiment of existential contraptions, I have no illusions that either one of us really is closer to what may or may not be the optimal understanding of these enormously complex relationships out in the is/ought world.

All of this basically revolving around the assumptiom that your own analysis and assessment here is clearly more in sync with that which any serious philosopher is capable of grasping.

That is why you are exasperated. It has nothing to do with my own speculation that to the extent you come to recognize that my points may well be applicable to you, you are less able to square your own composure with the recognition that your own wants/preferences may well in fact just be embedded in the particular existential contraption that revolves around the particular sequence of experiences, realtionships and access to information/knowledge/ideas that came to predispose you to embody one particular “I” rather than another.

In other words, whereas I have much to gain if can come to see the world as you do, you have much to lose if you succumb to my own truly grim outlook on life re the existential juncture that is identity, value judgments and political economy.

All I can assume here is this: that, with respect to your own particular “I” confronting conflicting goods, you seem able to sustain a sense of self that appears [to me] less fractured and fragmented in a No God world where objective morality is not within reach.

And, in feeling fractured and fragmented myself here, this precipitates a frame of mind such that I am unable to attain that which would seem to be a more comforting and consoling psychological sense of reality.

And while you claim to bring this failure to communicate down to earth, I don’t see many examples of that at all.

And there any number of contexts that we can explore here.

You said “Again: We need to bring these “general descriptions” down to earth. What in particular are you doing that pisses others off and why in particular are they pissed off about it?”

I provide example.

Then you say “What is this but a single snapshot of someone being pissed off about something in a particular context.”

:laughing:

Yes I suppose you’re right… “I” is a contraption.

Well, you’re not even trying to convey the meaning. You’re speaking in difficult to interpret vernacular and beating around the bush, then tossing me an old thread so I can rummage around and by chance possibly stumble upon the right definition. It’s just not that important to me to know the definition of that word to put all this work into it especially when you won’t reciprocate and put work into a succinct and clear definition to save me all this stabbing in the dark.

Wikipedia says Dasein is a German word that means “being there” or “presence” (German: da “there”; sein “being”), and is often translated into English with the word “existence”.

But you don’t use it that way. Wikipedia goes on to say “Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings.”

But you don’t use it that way either. You keep talking about conflicting goods and contraptions, so I’m clueless how you’re defining that word.

I figured Dasein meant the feeling of being “I” and having a perspective on the world since that is about the only thing I don’t have a word for, otherwise it’s a synonym for existence.

If you aren’t conscious of it, then it’s not a contraption. Contraption is just a synonym for concept.

They’re arguing because arguing is fun. Some people smoke without regard to legality. IOW, the law is completely inconsequential. How many people buy things online and then diligently send in their sales taxes? Nobody. We don’t argue about it because we don’t think about it. People don’t debate whether or not to send in their sales taxes because the thought never crosses their mind.

Let’s try a dialogue:

Why are you walking?
I don’t know.
Where are you going?
No where.
Which direction are you going?
It looks like north.
Why are you walking north?
I don’t know
So you’re walking with no destination in mind?
Apparently.
Why?
I don’t know.
Why are you doing something that has no purpose?
Why are you asking questions?
I don’t know.
There is your answer.

Case #2

Why are you walking?
Car broke down.
Where are you going?
Work.
Why are you going to work?
To make money.
Why do you want money?
So I can eat.
Why eat?
So I can live.
Why live?
So I can go on.
Go on doing what?
Working.
Do you like to work?
No.
So you do something you do not like doing in order to go on doing something you do not like doing?
So it would seem.

Who is more rational?

First you must demonstrate why empirical observation underpins truth before requiring me to adhere to it and the only way you could do that is by deduction and that undermines your very claim that only empiricism upholds truth.

Goethe said “Thinking… is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.” What’s the difference in what is observed and what is deduced? Either an be a hallucination. There is no difference in a priori and a posteriori… only a contraption separates them.

Deduction is demonstration.

It’s not rational to put such faith in lying eyes.

Yes, Einstein didn’t take his own advice and got stuck in a dogmatic hole.

The problem is you dictate the form that demonstration should take as if the fact that I can’t take a picture of it means it isn’t valid, but you can’t substantiate why a picture is worth more than words without using the very words you’re demonizing.

If you do not like my definition of existence, then offer up a new one. What does it mean to exist if existence is not relationship?

Uke and Nage. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uke_(martial_arts

The only hard evidence I could possibly give is to bang a gong and leave it to you to figure out how you know the gong exists. But you want words so you can then pound the table in demand of proof. You can’t see that you’re chasing your own tail?

Deduction. How can you know anything? How do you know you have clothes on? You look in the mirror and the electromagnetic radiation being re-radiated off the mirror seems to indicate you have your clothes on and the neural input seems consistent with the feel of clothes on your skin, you can deduce that you’re dressed and ready to go outside. There is nothing that is not deduction or there is nothing that is not observation; either way works. Problems come when you try to separate the two as if one is valid and the other is not.

This is an area I went into briefly with Iambiguous, but I see you take it up also. Demonstrate empirically…
No one holds themselves to this criterion. Not scientists, no one. There are all sorts of practical reasons. We sure can’t run around sitting in on all the empirical research, for example.
So we, especially, but not only laypeople, go on the assumption that if something is respected by the community of scientists as repeatedly demonstrated, then it has been empirically demonstrated. But note, this way of determining the truth of something includes not only deduction but also intuition. Something along the lines of ‘Someone would have definitely noticed if they were confusing correlation with cause.’ Or ‘The research was not funded by parties interested enough in certain outcomes to create an effective conscious or unconscious bias.’ Or ‘This interpretation of the data is going to last.’ Iambiguous wants a very clear line between what consensus science concludes and the seeming randomness of what people decide is good or bad. But there is no hard line. If one points this out to him he will interpret this as saying that someone can give him the solution to the abortion issue, the correct objective stance that can be demonstrated to all rational people. And so he maintains a false dichotomy between realms. None of this means that there are objective morals, but it does reflect on the formation of holes. If you are in a hole about ought, but not is, on certain claimed grounds, these may need to be revised if ‘is’ issues are not so clearly distinguished from ‘ought’ ones. It is not that abortion is suddenly morally determinable; it is rather that there is instability on the ‘is’ end, instability and revision he only connects with ‘ought’ issues. And the history of science is littered with incredible fundamental revision around very basic and important to humans sense of life and themselves issues.

There are a lot of holes on could, potentially, fall into and mull over and torture oneself with. If one is mainly in one hole, but not others, this is likely significant. And the reasons may or may not be the ones one thinks are the reasons. Self-evidence and our ability to effectively introspect in our cognitive lives has been empirically demonstrated :smiley: to be shakey at best.

So, then, what is your epistemology, Serendipper. It feels - carefully chosen verb - like you are a bit like me as far as epistemology: ad hoc, bricoleur, mixed…

But my point does not revolve around the examples themselves so much as how particular preferences here are more or less embedded in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

You give your example. You react to it. Others then react to your reaction either by being in sync with your behavior or not in sync with it.

If not in sync with it, then what? Are there limitations here beyond which philosophers are unable to go? Or is there in fact an argument available to all rational and ethical men and women such that they are obligated to embody it or to be seen as irrational and unethical human beings?

And, of even greater importance to me, how are those who reject objective morality here able to sustain a “sense of identity” that is not fractured and fragmented?

What are you after then, the definition of it? The meaning of it?

Instead, over and again, I attempt to convey the manner in which I have come to understand it existentially “out in the world” of actual human interactions:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

And then I attempt to convey what I construe to be the psychology of the objectivist “I” here:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

In the Heideggerian sense ,“I” is thrown into existence at birth historically and culturally “here and now” instead of “there and then”. Okay, so what are the existential implications of this in exploring conflicted moral and political narratives/agendas?

What can the ethicists tell us for sure about right and wrong behavior? And what makes this peculiar to human beings is precisely the fact that unlike other species, we make a considerably bigger distinction between the either/or and the is/ought world.

All I can do here is to convery the manner in which I construe “I” as an “existential contraption” out in the is/ought world:

[i]Contraption: a machine or device that appears strange or unnecessarily complicated, and often badly made or unsafe.

Starting here, is it then reasonable to think of the self – “I” – as a kind of contraption when probing the question, “what ought all men and women do?”

I think so. In the sense that “I” here is composed of any number of vast and varied existential variables that comprise any particular individual’s life. And to others these assessments can certainly seem strange and complicated. After all, what do we [can we] really know about the sense of “reality” construed by others?

And we often look at the behaviors of others as badly chosen or unsafe to the extent that they are not the behaviors that we would choose.

So, how you think about yourself in any specific context [related to any specific set of behaviors] will depend in large part on which particular variables you choose to emphasize. Those you include, those you leave out.

And how is that then not an “existential contraption” more or less?[/i]

And then to ask others how this either does or does not make sense to them.

Again, bringing this down to earth. Bob is on trial for murdering Bill. A mountain of evidence [including fingerprints and DNA] is able to convince a jury that he is guilty. They [or the judge] then sentence him to death. What then are the facts [using either deduction or induction] that is able to establish in turn that executing him is just or moral or “the right thing to do”?

What’s your own argument here? And how do you see it as either embedded or not embedded in the components of my own moral philosophy. A philosophy that revolves around the assumption that both moral narratives and political agendas revolve around arguments that revolves around “existential contraptions”.

In a No God world.

All hopelessly abstract of course. What specific idea does a particular mind think it perceives? In what particular context? What can be established as in fact true for all rational men and women and what cannot?

You pick the context.

Yes and all astrophysicists are wholly in agreement with you about the universe? And in what particular context is a particular self biting or seeing or cutting someone or something? And how do others react to it?

And then…infinity?

The form is simple. It is encompassed here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

You note for us a value judgment of your own. Then you piece together the most important experiences, relationships and access to information/knowledge/ideas embedded in the life you lived such that you were predisposed to one political prejudice rather than another.

Then you explore the gap between this and the arguments of those who insist that in being in sync with “the real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”, they are able to differentiate objectively between good and evil.

Then situate your own take on your own “I” in these interactions.

But my emphasis here is less on a definition of existence and more on the manner in which you take this definition out into the is/ought world – the world of conflicting goods.

What can we demonstrate is in fact related to something else? For example, in the either/or world sex can be related to pregnancy can be related to abortion. And then, legally, in particular political jurisdictions, abortion can be related to arrest and trial and conviction and punishment. How then is discussing these relationships the same? How are they different?

In other words, how are deductions pertaining to the either/or world the same or different from deductions pertaining to the is/ought world.

And be specific. Bring your words out into the world of actual conflicted goods in actual existential contexts.

There is a general consensus among those doctors able to perform abortions regarding how [medically] to go about it. And this is predicated on that which can in fact be known objectively about human biology, human sexuality and the creation of new life in a pregnant woman’s uterus. And while there are many conflicting arguments regarding the rightness or wrongness of snuffing this life out, they are hardly plucked at random out of thin air.

One woman’s set of circimstances is different from another. One woman’s experiences in life have predisposed her to one set of political prejudices rather than another. What is at stake for one woman may or may not be what is at stake for another.

It’s all embedded existentially in particular permutations of particular sets of existential variables.

Is this or is this not what most objectivists will convey? It’s only a question of their moral font of choice here. Sacred or secular. But how is their moral “stance” here not predicated on the assumption that had they lived very different lives that stance might well have been very different? And what can they argue given that both sides have access to reasonable points of view given particular sets of assumptions regarding “the human condition”. Non-objectivists of KTs ilk are simply able to shrug that part off in a manner in which I am not able to. But this too is seen by me as embedded existentially in dasein.

His own “existential leap” to a particular political prejudice here is merely seen by him to be more “stable”. Though, who knows, perhaps someday science and/or philosophy will in fact be able to establish a frame of mind here in which beyond all doubt it can be demonstrated that those who wish to be thought of as rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to think this way. And then to predicate their behaviors on the truly “right thing to do”.

Let’s call them the Neo-Kantians.

Then all that is now “ad hoc” will be a thing of the past.

Well, not counting the sociopaths who insist that in a No God world morality revolves entirely around not getting caught doing anything and everything perceived to be wrong by others. The fact that it sustains their own perceived self-interest need be as far a it goes.

I was listening to a Matt Dillahunty show yesterday (real sharp fella btw) where a caller asked him to substantiate reason and evidence without using reason and evidence to which Matt replied “well you sorta can” but never did. So I thought for a minute and was taken back to Goethe’s worldview that deduction is merely another form of vision, so I wondered how one could substantiate anything they perceive and I don’t think we can because substantiation would be objective and objectivity is the observerless observation. What’s “really real” cannot be beheld lest it be tainted by subjective interpretation through the lens of an observer. Alan says “Everyone has a metaphysical assumption that they can’t prove; watchout for it.” I suppose everyone starts with a set of assumptions (axioms) and builds their logic from there. For instance “All statements must be backed by empirical evidence” but it’s impossible to show evidence for that statement and it’s just assumed to be self-evident and held on faith.

A long time ago, after receiving simultaneous polar opposite interpretations of my writing, it dawned on me that more can be discerned about the one viewing art than the artist himself. I could draw a picture of something and it doesn’t mean anything, necessarily, about me, but how someone reacts to it reveals much about them. So we see objectivity cannot be discerned (what the artist intended), but subjectivity is revealed (what sort of person is viewing the art). Likewise when someone says all statements must be empirically verifiable, nothing of objective truth is learned, but the person who said it reveals himself as what Alan describes as the “prickly” sort as opposed to the “gooey”.

Here’s a short cartoon illustrating it:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU[/youtube]

In a conversation with Gloominary I realized that morality is nothing more than veiled “might makes right” where people, by virtue of numbers, impose their ideals on others and pedestalize it as righteousness. The herd determines objectivity (what’s right) by virtue of numbers (might) and they fool themselves into thinking it’s something more intrinsic/absolute/fundamental than merely that.

Matt Dillahunty showcases this by challenging theists who assert the biblical foundation for morality to justify stoning an unruly child on the edge of town because Matt feels that stoning children is objectively wrong and I wonder how he knows. I get the impression that he’s pandering to primal instincts of masses of people for the purpose of exposing biblical immorality, but if the bible isn’t the source of morality, then what spooky knowledge is he exclusively privy to? How does he know stoning unruly children on the edge of town is morally wrong? Well it’s just that the majority of people find the idea unpalatable and probably would find me unpalatable for even suggesting that such an act isn’t objectively wrong.

Yes I think so because the objective is the observerless observation. All we can know is only in relation to something else.

If someone is obligated to embody something lest they be viewed as irrational, then you’ve defined objectivity in terms of popularity. Truth is merely consensus of opinion.

This is saying a house built upon the sand will wash away, right? Because there is no objective foundation to underpin anything. Well, don’t build a house. Why invest in the temporary?

Yes. I try to define the terms I intend to use so others have an idea of what I’m talking about. It doesn’t mean the terms always mean what I define them to be and they don’t necessarily have to be consistent with the dictionary, but they’re defined in order to help convey what I’m thinking.

For instance: Existence is a relationship, Reality is the interaction between subject and object, Objectivity is the observerless observation, Infinity is the boundless, a Thing is that which is mutually exclusive from anything else. So what is Dasein?

Why do you compel me to read all that? It’s 4 pages and 80 posts and I don’t know in which post the definition resides. What can’t you just tell me what it means?

In that thread you said "And, then, in turn, this resulted in my tumbling down into a philosophical “hole” such that for all practical purposes, “I” became increasing more fragmented. "

“I” doesn’t exist in any objective sense. It’s an illusion pinned between two eternal darknesses. You’re not going crazy, but becoming sane, but you live in a crazy world sending you mixed signals. Krishnamurti said “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

How do you make moral and political judgements? Well, not based on what’s right, but based on what you believe would be best for you. For instance I believe having an educated, healthy, wealthy community is best for me. I don’t righteously care about people, but I care about myself and what’s good for people is generally good for me. I’m not serving some god or some objective morality, but I’m looking out for my own ass. And how do I know what’s good for me? I don’t. I’m just guessing like if I suppose that not sticking my hand in fire is best for me. Keeping my hand out of fire seems like the right thing to do and likewise aligning myself politically liberal seems like what is best for me.

You’re groping for some objective pedestal to perch yourself upon, but it just isn’t there. There is no handbook, no written law, no rule of thumb to consult and each instant in time is a decision you’ll have to make based on what you want to do.

You began at the big bang because that’s where all the newtonian billiard balls lead us and you are the big bang still coming on.

The only thing we know for sure is there is nothing we know for sure.

Yes maybe so. I think the desire to delineate the world into dualities (right and wrong) is a way of manifesting the self. So clinging to objectivity is resisting death of the self. The only way to exist is to carve yourself out of obscurity and form clear distinctions between this and that. I am here and everything else is over there. When the lines get fuzzy, then you get fragmented. I think it’s mighty perceptive of you to notice it.

Without the ability to read minds, we can only guess what others see.

Yes, I hate that people do that. Each person should be their own judge of the level of risk they are willing to accept. Why “should”? Because that’s what’s best for me because I don’t want people telling me I have to wear a seatbelt or helmet or be plagued by low-fat food or whatever well-intentioned regime they’d have me on. I want to do what I want to do. It’s not an objective should, but a subjective should.

Yes it’s all subjective.

I don’t know, but why does it matter? The concept of a contraption is a contraption because contraption is a synonym for concept.

There are two forms of knowledge: conceptual and nonconcpetual. The latter is the knowledge employed to beat your heart and the former is the contraptions you’re on about.

Morality is veiled “might makes right”. Rather than retype it, I’ll refer you to my post to Karpel viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194190&start=100#p2711863

What color red does a particular mind think it perceives? How do I know what I perceive as red is the same color that you see in your mind when you perceive red? Maybe what your mind sees is what I call blue.

The context for the object is the subject.

Nothing.

Irrelevant.

[i]The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle, loosely based on the American television game show Let’s Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975 (Selvin 1975a), (Selvin 1975b). It became famous as a question from a reader’s letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant’s “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine in 1990 (vos Savant 1990a):

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Vos Savant’s response was that the contestant should switch to the other door (vos Savant 1990a). Under the standard assumptions, contestants who switch have a 2/3 chance of winning the car, while contestants who stick to their initial choice have only a 1/3 chance.

Many readers of vos Savant’s column refused to believe switching is beneficial despite her explanation. After the problem appeared in Parade, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine, most of them claiming vos Savant was wrong (Tierney 1991). Even when given explanations, simulations, and formal mathematical proofs, many people still do not accept that switching is the best strategy (vos Savant 1991a). Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, remained unconvinced until he was shown a computer simulation demonstrating the predicted result (Vazsonyi 1999). [/i] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Like Mark Twain said, what most people know, isn’t worth knowing.

Truth may be consensus of opinion, but that doesn’t mean it’s really true.

Yes I guess so. I call it as I see it because I can’t call it as I don’t see it.

There is no difference and the ought is either/or because ought is discerned through relativity. You ought to do that, else this will happen.

Still, as soon as you try to grapple with the implications of this, you are so far out on the metaphysical limb that, for all practical purposes, it becomes meaningless. A universe that simply is what it is. And with absolutely no one or no thing around to know that?

No, in a world where some measure of human autonomy does in fact exist, it still comes down to that which can be demonstratred to be true objectively for all of us. We just don’t know the limits of that. We accept that this exchange exists for all with access to the internet. That can be reasonably demonstrated. But how is it demonstrated that my argument or your argument is closer to the objective truth?

Unless perhaps it can be demonstrated that, say, the exchange is just part of some Sim world in which you and I are merely characters in minds beyond our capacity to even grasp.

Then what?

Many aspects of our existence are squarely embedded in the either/or world. There are many facts about our lives that can be easily established. The fractured and fragmented “I” revolves instead around the part embedded in an is/ought world. A world in which points of view are seen by me as more a manifestation of an existential contraption which become embodied in any particular dasein out in any particular world historically, culturally and experientially.

Since I construe dasein [out in the is/ought world] to be an existential contraption derived largely from lives/relationships that can differ in many, many extraordinary ways, it is best in my view to situate that which I construe it to mean “out in the world.”

And then to invite others to try to pin down their own rendition/description of “I” at the intersection of identity, values and political power.

I compel no one. And it is the OP that I am mainly preoccupied with.

Instead, you appear to want the “25 words or less” version. The meaning and the defintion of dasein.

Like dasein were an actual thing I could take out of my pocket and say, “here, this is dasein”.

What I am interested in is how you and others react to the OP such that the points raised are either more in or more out of sync with your own “I” when confronted with conflicting goods.

There are clearly things about yourself “here and now” that are true objectively: your age, your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your height, your weight…the place where you were born, the experiences you had, the relationships you sustained, the books you read, the films you viewed etc.

And let folks like Krishnamurti bring “general descriptions” of this sort down out of the clouds of abstraction and park them in particular contexts precipitating particular behaviors deemed to be either sick or healthy.

Let them discuss particular social, political and economic permutations that evolve over time historically and culturally.

Quite the contrary. My aim is more to expose the dangers embedded in the moral and political narratives of the objectivists here among us. And, in turn, embedded in narratives of the moral nihilists. In particular, those that own and operate the global economy.

Yes, but “here and now” there are still distinctions to be made [in the either/or world] between those relationships able to be demonstrated as true for all of us and individaul reactions to those relationships which appear [to me] to be considersably more subjective.

Again, the problem I have with points like this is how abstract they are. Bring this assessment down to earth and note its relevance when confronting behaviors in conflict over value judgments.

Point us to a particular context that is embedded in your own life; or to one in which a great deal of news has been generated of late.

That’s true up to a point. But there is still the capacity to demonstrate that what you believe is true “in your head” is that which all rational men and women are obligated to believe in turn.

It’s just that different individuals will draw the line here in different places. Is it true objectively that human life begins at conception? Or do we become actual human beings further on down the line? How can this be determined once and for all? And, once determined, how ought rational men and women configure their moral and political narratives in regard to abortion?

It matters because the extent to which you come to recognize that your value judgments are derived more from a particular sequence of experiences than from any deontological assessment, is the extent to which you are less likely to embrace objectivism.

Instead, you are more likely to embrace moderation, negotiation and compromise in your political interactions with others.

Then it’s just a matter of whether or not you take this as far as “I” do. Tumbling all the way down into a hole like mine.

Well, it is certainly true that when push comes to shove what counts is the extent to which you are able to enforce “rules of behavior” more to your own liking. But that doesn’t make your own “liking” here any less an existential contraption to me.

KT is hell bent on insisting that his own rendition of “pragmatism” is not an existential contraption. But I certainly see it as one. He lived a particular life predisposing him to a particular set of values; but he refuses to let the implications of that disturb him as much as they disturb me. In other words, “fracture and fragment” his own particular “I” when confronting conflicting goods.

And to speak of grasping these relationships “epistemologically” speaks volumes regarding the gap between us.

Still, I have to admit that there may well be an epistemological foundation allowing us to assess them wholly.

Or we can just argue that in a wholly determined universe this exchange itself is inherently embedded in the ontological [and teleological?] “fabric of reality”.

As for your rendition of Vos Savant’s rendition of the Monty Hall problem, what on earth does that have to do with the gap between what we think we know about the universe and all that would need to be known about it in order to encompass it objectively?

Would all astrophysicists weigh in on this in the precise manner in which you do?

I must be missing something here in grasping your point. You may be “calling things as you see them”, but what you see is likely to be only a teeny, tiny sliver of all that can be seen going back to an ontological understanding of the existence of existence itself.

Still, you have to admit this point will be easier to understand if you take it out into the world that we live in and embed it in a context in which deductions are made regarding facts able to be established and then made regarding our reactions to those facts such that some insist they indicate we ought to behave one way while others insist they indicate we ought to behave in another way.

Yes I think so. If there is something else, we could only see it through our subjective lens in relation only to what we already know.

There is no objective truth. I’m cold. Are you cold? Is everyone cold? No, it’s subjective to be cold.

This exchange may exist for everyone, but everyone will see it differently, so it exists uniquely for every person. There is no objective way to discern this thread. I speak in a way I think you will understand and you read in regard to a way you think I speak.

It could be. Where do your decisions come from?

Who is asking?
Me!
Who are you?
Me, over here, I’m running that guy.
Ok, then who are you?
Me, over here, I’m running that guy who is running that guy.
Ok, then who are you?
Me, over here, I’m the one in charge.
Ok, then who are you?
.
.
.

On and on forever. We can never get to the origins of our decisions because we cannot take an objective view of ourselves.

So dasein is the subjective view of the world?

Yes

I can define things that can’t be taken out of my pocket and displayed.

Conflicting goods is a duality (either or) and is required to have existence.

No, it’s a relationship. I lived this many revolutions of the earth around the sun. There is no objective time.

All these things exist as a relationship.

Assertion of things that do not exist, as objects of attainment, would seem to me sick

If something were true for all of us, what would it mean?

There is nothing that’s not abstract except the one thing that can’t be beheld because you cannot look at yourself. Everything that you think is a thing is carved out of something bigger (ie an abstraction).

Religion, for example, is a way of manifesting oneself as a good person in relation to bad people. “I am special because I do the right thing… unlike those heathen over there.” When the lines between the righteous and heathen gets blurry, then identity goes away (fragmented and fractured). If there is no good and bad, then you can’t be a good person because the concept doesn’t exist. All religion is arrogance and nothing can be more egotistical than true repentance.

So we practice the religion of no religion because we want to be better than those arrogant fools practicing religion, but then we find we’re just as arrogant in our religion of no religion. What a trap! Freedom from the trap comes when you realize that you and the trap are the same thing, but then you lose all identity and realize that’s no fun, so you’ll renounce satori and go back in the game.

Good tune by Jim Croce called “Age”:

I’ve traded love for pennies; sold my soul for less.
Lost my ideals in that long tunnel of time.
And I’ve turned inside out and 'round about and back and then
Found myself right back where I started again.

youtube.com/watch?v=i1LvlKvr3B4

Here and now is the only place to be because there isn’t anywhere else to go, but you can try.

When does conception begin?

I say further down, but what defines human? If we ask people what defines being human, they’ll differentiate it with regard to machines (empathy, compassion, creativity, etc). So if we apply that yardstick, at what age does a person display those attributes? Some never do. So now what? If we say humans are animate, then how do we differentiate from animals?

According to their own convictions I suppose. Matt Dillahunty had a good argument for abortion saying that if one human doesn’t have the right to parasite himself off another human without permission, then why afford that right to humans who haven’t been born? That seems pretty solid.

I don’t see much difference. Even if reason and evidence were a foundation, we still must have faith in it. There is no distinction between the absolute and the relative because whatever truth you hold will be relative to that yardstick. You either appeal to deontology or popularity or whatever foundation in accordance with how you’re put together and with regard to a particular sequence of experiences.

But really, if there were an objective morality, it would exist independent of humans, which makes no sense because how can morality exist without moral agents? Morality is emergent and not absolute.

Anytime you find yourself in a trap that you can’t escape, it means you and the trap are one. It’s an infinite abyss of your own making.

I’m just saying that morality exists only because people, by virtue of numbers (might), say so (makes right). Might makes right. There is no way to know objectively if the baby that was not aborted will not grow up to be the next Hitler or the baby that was aborted could have discovered the cure for cancer… or even if a cure for cancer is good.

This is the parable of the chinese farmer

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX0OARBqBp0[/youtube]

If we can’t tell what is good or bad, then how can we have rules?

I can’t think of anything that isn’t a contraption because I can only think in terms of contraptions. Bruce Lee said we learn to forget meaning we practice so hard for so long that our routine becomes a part of us and is no longer conscious, but an unconscious reflex. So it transcends contraptions (conceptual/cataphatic knowledge) and enters into the non-conceptual (agnosis/apophatic) knowledge. By induction I believe we must have learned to beat our hearts at some point in evolutionary time and now it’s an unconscious reflex that requires no contraptions to operate. It doesn’t mean I’m right, but we had to acquire that knowledge somehow.

Pretty much, because if it weren’t so, there would be no reality. But no teleology because that would undermine the purpose of purposelessness.

1000 phds said she was wrong, so it’s illustration that what most astrophysicists think has no relevance. What most people know, ain’t worth knowing.

I think most astrophysicists (if they were fair and honest) would say to me “maybe you’re right, but who knows” because nobody knows. There are dozens of inflation theories and then variable speed of light theories and multiverse theories and who knows what else.

Is it odd that you’re looking for an absolute and then always tell me to bring it down to earth and relate it to something? If it’s absolute, it’s not relational and if it’s relational, then it’s not absolute. Objectivity is impossible because there is no context for it and it can’t be said in terms of anything. It can’t be brought down to earth and is abstract by definition.

What I always come back to here is that whatever else might exists, our subjective lenses either overlap such that it can be demonstrated to exist for all of us or it can’t. But if there are no conscious minds able to convey what they think does exist, what does it mean to say that it exist at all?

Sure, some seem able to wrap their head around this. I’m not one of them.

This part:

But some claims here seem to come considerably closer to that which “for all practical purposes” are construed by those who are “for all practical purposes” deemed to be rational human beings.

Would you be/feel cold buck naked at the North Pole? As opposed to, say, is it moral or immoral to strip someone buck naked at the North Pole? We might all respond subjectively to both inquiries. But who is kidding whom as to that which comes closest to whatever the objective truth might possibly be in a universe in which no one seems able to convey ontologically or teleologically what existence itself means.

True, but the fact that it does exist for all of us [sans Sim worlds, demonic dreams, solipsism etc.] seems to be clearly more true objectively than the subjective assessments regarding which of us comes closest to explaining it’s existence embedded in Existence itself.

It “could” be this, it “could” be that. The distinction I make here is between the either/or and the is/ought world. In explaining where our decisions come from, the former seems considerably more reliable regarding the extent to which these decisions can be demonstrated to be true for all of us.

For me, dasein – being thrown into the world “here and now” rather than “there and then” – is applicable more in the is/ought world. There are things about “who we are” that are true for everyone. But with regard to our moral and political values, “I” is seen by me to be considerably more an existential contraption.

Well, in that case, I suggest you take it up with the epistemologists here. Then after you have reached a consensus, bring the argument out into the world of conflicting goods. Such that “dasein”/“Dasein” can be understood more clearly by all those who wish to be thought of as rational human beings.

Okay, define freedom or justice…or time or space.

Technically true. That is, if, ontologically, you can define and encompass the meaning of time going all the way back to its very begininng. Or demonstrate beyond all doubt that it had no beginning at all.

And then imagine how, for all practical purposes, others would react to you refusing to say “I am 20 years old”. Instead you say “I am 7,300 revolutions around the Sun old.”

And then this: what about leap years?

Yes, but these things can at least be demonstrated to have happened. At least to the extent that you are able to do so. After all, even in the either/or world a God is needed to confirm the objective truth of everything.

Exist or do not exist in what particular context regarding what particular things?

What does it mean to say that it is true that the Sun exists for all of? As opposed to this: what does it mean to say that we should completely abandon the burning of fossil fuels and rely entirely on solar power?

Bingo: there are subjective points of view, and then there are subjective points of view.

More abstraction. Bring these assumptions down to earth. Note the actual existential implications of them pertaining to actual human interaction in conflict.

This part:

Again, as a “general description” of religion this seems reasonable enough. But how each of us come to embody “I” in either a God or a No God world, seems clearly to be embodied all the more in the manner in which I construe the existential meaning [if not the essential definition] of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

That brings a particular religious denomination down to earth. It situates it historically and culturally and experientially in a particular context in which claims are made. Claims that either can be demonstrated as true for all of us or claims that are predicated instead on religious assumptions that cannot.

Sure, you can take it back to that. Or can take that itself back to the very definition and meaning of Existence itself. Was there a conception involved then?

Will that ever show up on a youtube video?

Yes, so then it all comes down to philosophers or scientists actually being able to define…to define…human life. Whose yardstick? Whose definition? And we are animals.

And how are their convictions not embodied in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529

That’s what I do here. I offer others a chance to bring their own value judgments out into the world of conflicting goods that we live in today. To describe them such that they do not think of “I” here as being down in a hole.

It’s “solid” only given its initial assumptions. As though others who argue against abortion don’t have their own initial set of assumptions.

Then it comes down to the extent to which someone is willing to admit that: I’m right from my side, your right from your side. Or insists instead that their own assumptions are predicated objectively on one or another God or political ideology or intellectual [deontological] contraption or assessment of “nature”.

Yes, only to the extent that one is able to grasp Existence itself, are they able to jettison the part about faith. But some yardsticks – Donald Trump is president of the United States – seem considerally more likely to measure the objective truth than others – building Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border is the right thing to do.

You either grasp this distinction as I do here or you don’t.

What makes no sense to me is making an argument like this as though in making it it becomes true. And that is basically what you are doing here in my opinion. You have no capacity [that I know of] to substantiate this claim.

And all I ask is that you bring it down to earth and make an attempt to at least try. In particular, as it is relevant to answering the question, “how ought one to live”?

Again, what on earth does that mean? How are you not trapped in your own arguments [assumptions] about human interactions in conflict over values out of sync?

What do you do but, in regard to a conflict like abortion, take a particular political leap to the political leap of someone like Matt Dillahunty.

Assuming this and that, abortion is the right or the wrong thing to do. Assuming that your “I” is not down in the hole with my “I”.

As for the Chinese farmer? Maybe.

But the bottom line is always that one way or another the consequences of what we do or of what happens to us gets entangled in good or bad in a particular context out in a particular world construed from a particular point of view.

What is contrued to be good fortune when the farmer’s son is exempt from military service may be construed later as bad fortune when the enemy wins the war and confiscates the farm. You can take this sort of thing back as far as you are able.

But “for all practical purposes” there must be rules of behavior in any particular human community such that some behaviors are chosen to be rewarded and others chosen to be punished. Why these and not those?

And how close to my own understanding of this [given the components of my moral philosophy] is reasonable?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I always start from there. As opposed to the objectivists who start with the assumption that you are either “one of us” or you are wrong.

I’m not looking for an absolute so much as a frame of mind able to yank me up out of the hole that [intellectually and existentially] I have dug for myself. There seem to be facts about human interactions that we can all agree on. But we react to those facts differently in terms of what we think they tell us about right and wrong behaviors.

And that becomes more and more apparent [to me] when we discuss our specific reactions to specific behaviors out in particular contexts. “I” for me here is constrained by the facts. The facts don’t go away just because you think something else is true.

And then the part where the facts are acknowledged by everyone [John eats meat] but our reaction to the facts vary considerably [John ought to or ought not to eat meat].

With respect to existence itself, gravity is related to electromagnetism is related to the strong and the weak interactions. This part: science.howstuffworks.com/envir … nature.htm

Now, can we call these relationships truly absolute? Or, instead, are they related to forces we are not even privy to yet? Even going back perhaps to the existence of God?

To speak of “objectivity” here being either possible or impossible seems presumptive in the extreme to me.

You can’t possibly know what that means. Unless, perhaps, you do. And if you do, you should take any substantive evidence you have collected and communicate it to the scientific community at large and see how they react to it.

But I suspect that if any particular one of us had actually nailed all this stuff down, he or she would be on the cover of every magazine out there.

“Existence itself finally explained!!”

Think of it this way: If all bodies in the universe are moving, how can we know? We can only know ALL bodies are moving if there is one body that isn’t.

So there are two takeaways: 1) We cannot make logical conclusions about ALL things (because there is no reference point). 2) In order for movement to exist, there must be something that is still and so existence itself is a relationship (ie movement exists in relation to what isn’t moving).

So when you ask what can be demonstrated to ALL rational people, you’ve already left the realm of logic since it’s not possible to make logical conclusions about ALL things unless we make an exception that at least one thing is different.

Let’s say it’s objectively true that all things are ruled by God. How do we verify that? We can only verify all things are ruled by God if there is at least one thing that isn’t.

Let’s say all things exist inside the mind. How do we verify that? What difference does it make to anything in the mind that it’s in the mind? What difference does it make to things ruled by God that they’re ruled by God? It’s impossible to tell because there is nothing that is not ruled by God to compare it to. There is nothing that is not in the mind to compare it to. There is nothing that is not moving to compare it to. Objective statements are meaningless.

This reminds me of the time I had taken some lsd and became scared that I might freeze to death in -10F temps precisely because I could not feel the cold… or it didn’t feel cold to me. I wasn’t numb, but cold didn’t register as painful and I had no way to tell if I was in biological peril or not.

It boils down to what is good for you. If you and I were at the north pole and reliant upon each other for survival and you stripped me naked to freeze in the cold, then you’d be hurting yourself. You would have to act in ways that are consistent with what is commonly called “moral” in order to benefit yourself. To say those actions are moral is pedestalizing morality into something objectively true and then by showing reverence to it is a manifestation of arrogance because now you’re not doing something for your own benefit, but flattering yourself for following objective rules with the insinuation that someone else is not and that is how we get to people being burned at the stake and all sorts of righteous wars.

It doesn’t mean anything. Whatever happens in this universe cannot be remembered after the universe is gone. It’s all just dust in the wind and we pretend it’s not.

Wherever our decisions come from is the same for all of us because we’re all connected to the same spacetime fabric, but that fundamental thing can never be an object of knowledge because there is no one outside who can take an objective view.

Freedom is a relative term requiring an object to be free from. We can’t be simultaneously free from law and crime because we’re either free from crime because we’re bound to law or we’re subject to crime upon being freed from law. Being a slave is a good way to be free from worry, but to stand on one’s own and truly be free requires lots of strife and aggravation.

Justice is retribution according to some arbitrary moral code.

Time is a relation of the movement of one thing compared to another within space.

Space is the condition resulting from a delay in the transmission of information.

Time and space cannot be separated because if there were no time, then all travel would be instant and therefore there would be no space.

I think from the point of view inside spacetime (as a function of it), then time had no beginning, but from a point of view outside spacetime (if that were possible), then time would have a beginning (whatever that means outside of time). It’s analogous to someone going into a black hole: from his point of view, he’d go right in, but from the point of view of someone outside, he’d take forever to make it past the event horizon.

The natives used to talk in terms of “moons”: many moons ago.

That wouldn’t apply when using revolutions around the sun. Leap years only come because we make a year a tidy number of days (instead of 365.25 days) since we can’t have a 1/4 day.

If God confirms it, then it isn’t objective, but subjective according to the subjective lens of God.

Krishnamurti said “We are talking about something entirely different: you are talking about self-improvement while I am talking about elimination of the self.”

The sun exists to everyone that exists to the sun in a transactional and codependent relationship. The sun isn’t an objective thing. Solar power is free energy and seems the sensible thing to pursue. I’m not sure what you’re trying to show with this.

I don’t know how.

You want action A
I want action B
Who wins?

Metaphors reign where mysteries reside. There is no way to bring it down to earth and even if I could, it would simply create something else that needed to be brought down to earth.

We come to embody “I” because we’re trained to.

[i]In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase “oceanic feeling” to refer to the sensation of being one with the universe.[1] According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion.[2] Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated himself or herself from other people and things.[3]

Freud argues that the “oceanic feeling”, if it exists, is the preserved “primitive ego-feeling” from infancy. The primitive ego-feeling precedes the creation of the ego and exists up until the mother ceases breastfeeding. Prior to this, the infant is regularly breastfed in response to its crying and has no concept that the breast does not belong to it. Therefore, the infant has no concept of a “self” or, rather, considers the breast to be part of itself. Freud argues that those experiencing an oceanic feeling as an adult are actually experiencing a preserved primitive ego-feeling. The ego, in contrast, comes into existence when the breast is taken away, and involves the infant’s recognition that it is separate from the mother’s breast, and therefore, that other people exist. Freud argues that it would not necessarily contradict psychoanalytical theory for this primary ego-feeling to coexist along with the ego in some people. The main argument for this is that psychoanalytical theory holds that all thoughts are preserved in a conservation of psychic energy. Therefore, the “oceanic feeling” described as a oneness with the world or a limitlessness is simply a description of the feeling the infant has before it learns there are other persons in the world.[/i] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling

When things began is an abstraction (a cutout from the whole continuum and artificially labelled a thing). There are no things or events except the one thing and the one event.

I’m more than happy to play along, but it takes a good deal of energy to figure out what you’re meaning with these obscure terms like dasein, conflicting goods, here and now. Talking to you is expensive in terms of blood glucose lol

The only way to refute his argument would be to explain how you’re different from a fetus such that a fetus has the right to parasite itself off someone else but other humans do not.

Well, maybe the fetus has extra rights because it’s innocent, but isn’t that true of babies in general? So then even babies should have the right to parasite from other humans. At what age does that right terminate? Do we pull the plug after that age? And what about animals? They’re innocent too! So we should have animals attached by tubes to people to keep them alive? Is any human fair game or only the mother? Can we snatch people from walmart parking lots and harvest their organs for innocent babies so they can grow up to be sinners and have their organs reclaimed for more babies? All this is silly. It’s much easier to say the rigths of a fetus do not supersede the rights of anyone else.

Is it objectively true that the bishop moves diagonally in chess? What happens if someone changes the rule? Nothing happens because it’s not objective, but relational. Some people don’t consider Trump to be president.

What is objectively true would be true regardless of opinions, so if it were wrong to murder, then it wouldn’t be possible to murder. Since it is possible, then its not objectively wrong. Objectivity exists independent of ANY observer.

I’m starting to think you want to be in the hole and are fending off all attempts to pull you out because that’s where you want to be. That’s fine because I sometimes think I like being in a depressed and gloomy state: as long as things are bad, then I know everything is ok :laughing:

Right, there is no way to tell what is good or bad.

It’s completely arbitrary. Deer wouldn’t have long legs if predators couldn’t run fast. The societal organism will adapt to whatever rules are imposed and it honestly doesn’t care. The whole race can go extinct and it makes no difference because life could re-evolve billions of years from now or possibly in another universe in an amount of “time” impossible to quantify and no alternative carries any more appeal than any other.

Further, the moment you impose rules, the organism will evolve ways around them. It goes immediately to work in response to your change no differently than antibiotics train bacteria to be resistant, so the implementation of rules is an exercise in chasing your tail in a cat n mouse game where having a better cat just results in more clever mice.

I call them dogmatists.

Ought only exists in relation to a goal. If you want ________, then you ought to do _____________. If you don’t want anything, then there is no ought.

They are related to duality. Where did duality come from? Well, duality come from unity: the coin has heads and tails because it’s one coin.

Objectivity cannot exist unless it is observed and if it is observed, then it’s no longer objectivity, but subjectivity because it could only be observed through a subjective lens given by how the subject relates to the object.

For example, let’s say another universe exists, but we are unable to detect it in any way whatsoever. That universe would be objective because it’s not part of a subject/object relationship and yet it exists; it’s just sitting there all alone in the middle of nothingness. But because we have no way of detecting that universe, we can’t say that universe exists. And if we could detect that universe, then it would not be a universe, but simply part of our own.

They wouldn’t see it as fashionable.

This knowledge is 1000s of years old and went out of fashion long ago.

But in a universe where there are zero, zip and absolutely nada conscious entities around to discuss and debate this, what possible difference could it make whether there are entities that don’t move?

Given a complete understanding of how and why existence does in fact exist at all, there is [presumably] an objective truth. There are bodies that are still or there are not. But with no mortal minds on earth, no extrateresstrial minds or no Gods around to know this, what exactly does that mean?

The squabble over white swans and black swans would have been entirely moot with no minds around to create a narrative in which to discuss and to debate it.

But if there are no minds around to even ponder the question, it all comes down to the relationship between an existing God and all that encompasses existence.

But: There are no philosophers around to even bring up anything relating to this. The subjective/objective debate exists only because there are minds able to broach it in the first place. No minds no meaning.

Then the part where the meaning that any particualr mind attributes to “I” may well be entirely determined by the laws of nature.

But all of this is unfolding in a particular mind that either will or will nor perish in any particular context. Cold is perceived subjectively but there are certain biological parameters in which the capacity to perceive it is either sustained or not.

Not if killing you allowed me to consume you in order to sustain my own existence. In other words, in a context in which a rescue team was on the way and it was only a matter of surviving long enough for it to reach me. Good and bad here are points of view. And these are clearly more subjective than the objective parameters embedded in the either/or world of cold and human biology. And how this then factors into living or dying.

What always boggles my mind here is how folks manage to think themselves into believing things like this are true with no capacity to actually demonstrate empirically that it is true for all rational human beings. Instead, it is true for them “in their heads” based on a set of assumptions they make about the existence of existence itself.

This is more of the same to me. You assert something to be true based only on an intellectual contraption that you have concocted to explain 1] why something exists rather than nothing and 2] why this something and not something else.

Okay, but when you take this assumption out into the world of actual conflicting goods, how is it determined what the meaning of freedom is when John demands the freedom to own guns and Joe demands the feedom to live in a world without them?

And how is it demonstrated that either point of view is not just a manifestation of a wholly determined universe?

And how do we connect the dots between any particular answers that any particular one of us might give and an ontological definition and meaning of existence itself? And then to demonstrate the extent to which there is also a teleological component here?

Any particular moral code is embedded first and foremost in prescribing and proscribing rules of behavior that revolve around sustaining human life itself. Capitalism? Socialism? Fascism? Anarchism? Survival of the fittest? One or another rendition of Plato’s Republic?

Justice would seem to be largely ensconced in specific historical, cultural and interpersonal contexts re any actual community of men and women.

Again, as though you actually do have access to an understanding of time and space going all the way back to whatever brought them into existence in the first place.

Instead, you think this:

But how could thoughts of this sort not be predicated on certain sets of assumptions that may or may not be shared by others? Who is the one able to settle it once and for?

Black holes as they are understood now, and black holes as they will be understood 10,000 years from now. Can we even begin to grasp the intelligence gap here?

Or this:

Yes, it is always fascinating to speculate about these things. But to speak of them as though you can actually know what is in fact true here? Well, that is something I no longer imagine as within my own reach. Or within the reach of any mere mortal grappling to understand All There Is as an infinitesimally tiny speck of existence in what may well be a multiverse.

Or this:

Again, with respect to a particular human being interacting with other human beings in a particular context out in a particular world what of earth does that mean?!

How does “I” go about elimating his or her self? At best they can isolate themselves completely from all other conscious beings and commune with nature or with God. But their body will always be demanding food and water and shelter and protection. That part of “I” is either sustained or it perishes by tumbling over into an abyss that may or may not be oblivion.

I’m making a clear distinction between the extent to which human beings can in fact know that the sun is as close as we are ever likely to get to calling something an objective thing, and the seeming inabilty of particular value judgments about solar energy to be construed in turn as anything other than subjective/political opinions.

More abstraction. You want action A in a particular context. Someone else wants action B. Therse are objective facts. But how are philosophers able to determine which action reflects that most rational and virtuous action?

And to what extent is what you think you want here predicated more on rational discourse than on the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here?

And someone partial to Romain Rolland “oceanic feeling” or freud’s “primitive ego-feeling” would have to bring this down to earth. What do they mean in regard to particular behaviors that we choose in particular contexts given [in turn] what we think is true “in our head” about all of it in either a God or a No Go world.

Okay. Choose a context. Choose a set of behaviors in conflict. The whole point of bringing the discussion here down to earth is to make the terms less obscure. To connect them with the thinking of people who choose one thing rather than another. To note those objective facts that all rational men and women can agree are true for all of us.

Sans God, how could any mere mortal know beyond all doubt what the unborn have a right to? And, despite how different I might be from the fetus, I would not myself be around now if I had been aborted.

It always comes down to those who insist that the unborn have a “natural right” to life and those who insist that pregnant women have a “political right” to choose abortion.

Show me an argument able to demonstrate that it is either one or the other?

Sure, if you want to go that far out on the “what is reality?” limb, almost anything can be rationalized. But few are going to argue that it is immoral to recreate chess so the that the bishop can move both diagonally and horizontily/vertically.

And others can be just as adament that Trump is not president of the United States as they are that building the wall on the Mexican border is immoral.

“In our head” we can think that anything is true. We can think that Trump is just a character in a Sim world or a creation in some demonic dream. So all it can ever come down to in the end is in closing the gap between what we think is true and what we can demonstrate is in fact true for everyone. With even that problematic given the gap bewtween “I” here and a whole understanding of existence itself.

Again, as an intellectual contraption, this is true for you because it is in sync with all the assumptions you make about the meaning of “objective truth”, “opinions”, “murder” and “observers”.

But put these elements out in a particular context in which different people construe the meaning of a particular killing in conflicting ways and then what?

A particular killing may or may not be demonstrated to have in fact been a murder given the law in any actual particular human community. But different individuals interpreting the facts of the killing in different ways may or may not agree on whether the killing ought to have been illegal. Some may insist it is justified, while others insist it was not.

In other words, we may well not live in a world where there is an objective truth here that transcends the subjective opinions of the observers. They may all agree that Jim killed Jack. But they may not all agree that the killing was justified.

Unless of course we live in a wholly determined universe where so called “subjective opinions” are an illusion.

No, I am looking for others convinced that they are not down in this hole, to bring their own value judgments out into the world as I do here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

They either will or they won’t. And we will either agree that they have or we won’t.

On the contrary, it is embedded first and foremost in subsistence. And then the extent to which particular historical, cultural and experiential memes, shaped and molded by nature, are in turn able to reconfigure nature into any number of actual social, political and economic permutations. People just don’t embody particular thoughts and feelings and behaviors out of the blue.

Again, the exception here being a world in which everything –everything – unfolds only as it ever could have.

But even here we are back to why it is this way and not some other way.

That is an ought embedded more in the either/or world. John wants to eat meat. Okay, what ought he to do to accomplish this? Well, he can hunt the animals down himself, he can purchase it in the grocery store, he can steal it from someone. He either does in fact accomplish it or he doesn’t. But that is different from the ought embedded in the is/ought world.

Ought he to be a hunter? Ought he to steal? Ought he to eat meat at all?

And human goals…how are they not embedded/emdodied largely in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein?

And then conflicting goods. And then political economy.

I have no idea what “on earth” something like this means. Let alone how it relates to the manner in which I construe the subjective/objective distinction relating to conflicting goods in a No God world.

To the extent that gravity and the other forces are true “absolutely”…how is that related “for all practical purposes” to this duality coming from unity. A coin is a man-made thing embedded in, among other things, the manner in which any particular community goes about sustaining the means of productions. Money, in other words. But there are any number of ferocious conflicts that revolve around what is deemed “just” in regard to the use and the distribution of money in any particular community.

Yeah, I sometimes come close to understanding things like this “theoretically”. But when actual flesh and blood human beings observe actual phenomena out in a particular world, there are still going to be those things that reasonable people can agree are true, and those things which are deemed true given an attachment to a particular set of moral and political prejudices. Which I then largely subsume in dasein.

The point is that movement only exists in relation to something else. There is no such thing as objective movement. Conscious entities are beside the point.

Restate it this way “Given a complete understanding of how and why relativity does in fact exist at all, there is [presumably] an objective truth.” Why? Why does objectivity need to exist in order for relativity to exist?

Why would conscious minds change the meaning? Without conscious minds, it means nothing; with conscious minds, it means nothing.

Exactly, but that doesn’t mean it’s objectively meaningful.

I say meaning doesn’t exist even with the minds. Or the meaning only exists relative to the minds.

Yes but instead of looking at what that means about the “I”, look at what that means about the laws of nature.

Consciousness is not a complicated form of mineral, but mineral is a simple form of consciousness. Whatever it is that makes us “I” is a native property of the universe.

Maybe if you didn’t eat me, I would have been the next Hitler. Hitler was in the trenches of WWI and credits god to saving him for a purpose, so if some rogue soldier would have shot him, which would have been considered immoral, how moral would the consequences be?

Should we assume meaning and require empirical demonstration that meaning is absent?
Or should we assume lack of meaning and require empirical demonstration of meaning?

Should we assume __________ exists and require proof that it does not?
Or should be assume _________ does not exist and require proof that it does?

I don’t know why you put the burden of proof at my doorstep and I don’t know why you put so much faith in empirical observation, especially popular ones. That seems like a whole string of logical fallacies.

First you require me to prove something does not exist, with empirical evidence of its nonexistence, then you require me to do it in such a way that most people would agree. It’s impossible.

This is just logic. I’ve not asserted anything but logic. If something exists, then it is connected to everything that it exists to, which makes the maximum possible things in existence = 1.

This is the same as a disagreement with a girlfriend: she wants to go out and I want to stay in, so who wins? I’ve never been able to answer that question.

In the case of John and Joe, we could ask more people and make a popularity contest of it. There is no objective answer since the question is essentially should all ice cream be chocolate or vanilla.

You could say that public safety is objective, but I don’t want to be safe and would prefer having some elements of danger lurking about.

It’s determined by randomness.

If there were teleology, there would be no point. If god planned everything and is guiding everything, then why do anything? Why don’t you talk to yourself? Because you already know what you will say. There is no point in asking yourself a question if you already know the answer.

Why sustain life? Is that individual life or the collective’s life? We want to live and sustain our species because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here, but that doesn’t mean that wanting to live is objective; it just happens to be conditional to living in the environment that happened to come about.

Seems to be common sense to me. How could we have time without space and space without time?

I don’t see how popularity is relevant. Either it makes sense to you or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t, then why not?

If we could, there would be no point in going forward.

This isn’t rocket science. If god is the subject, then his view is subjective. If god is the object, then who is the subject?

If our universe came from a multiverse, then the multiverse is simply part of our universe. If the multiverse is not part of our universe, then our universe didn’t come from it.

By realizing there is no difference between you and everything else that is going on. There is no organism + environment, but either an organism with no environment or an environment with no organism; the differentiation is an illusion and the feeling of “I”. This isn’t something you can accept overnight because it takes time to grow the neural pathways to behold it before you could even judge it true or false. I’m about 2 years in and I still don’t have my head fully around it.

In the bible it says “Choose this day whom ye shall serve”, but how can we choose anything when all we know was from indoctrination? I grew up in Christianity and only now, from the outside, do I feel like I can even make a choice. I think likewise that you can’t choose anything until you get out of your hole and can see clearly to make a choice.

The sun is not an objective thing and couldn’t even be discerned by dark matter. All dark matter would feel is the gravity, which could be more dark matter. The sun only exists as a sun because there are things acting as not-sun.

On a coin flip, is heads more rational and virtuous than tails? If someone resonates with your position, they will say you are more rational; if they resonate with my position, they will say I am more rational. It’s still subjective. Even if everyone on earth agreed with you, it would still be subjective.

This is like the value of money being determined by subjective valuing vs the government setting the objective value. Right now $1 is worth 1/1200 ounce of gold because the last trade says so, but the gov could set the price and it would be true even if no trades are placed and regardless what anyone thinks about it. Objectivity is true independent of any observers. Subjectivity is conditional to observation. So if everyone on earth decided this is what money should be worth, it would still be subjective, because it matters what subjects observe.

I don’t understand that question.

It just means your decisions come as a result of all the variables in the universe instead of just a few variables.

So by “bringing down to earth” you mean examples?

Like in the money example, even if everyone agreed, it would still be subjective because it depends upon subjective interpretation, which just happens to be reproducible across all humans. Surely you can see that just because 100% of people prefer vanilla over chocolate that it’s still a subjective interpretation; it’s just that all the subjective preferences happen to align.

Yeah I guess so, but even God’s opinion is subjective.

You’re right. There are those who subjectively interpret that the unborn have rights and there are those who subjectively interpret that women have rights; it’s the chocolate vs vanilla preference again; pepsi vs coke. There is no right answer, just those who believe one way and those who believe the other. If god exists, then he has an opinion too, I suppose. But if abortion were objectively wrong, then it wouldn’t be possible; abortion would be independent from anything anybody thought about it. We all have to die and why does it matter if it’s 80 microseconds or 80 years from now? Once it’s all over, no one will know any different.

Trump could give an order and everyone simply says “no”. Trump only has power because the people are willing to play along and pretend he does.

We could think of gravity as objective since I can’t think of anything immune to it and just to illustrate that we do not have a choice about whether to obey it. We don’t protest in the streets about whether or not to observe gravity. If morality were like gravity, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But gravity isn’t objective either since it’s conditional upon spacetime, but it’s close enough for an example. Anything that exists as a function of spacetime will be subject to gravity (since gravity affects spacetime itself). Dark energy could be independent of gravity, but I’m not sure.

Then we’ll get a range of subjective opinions.

Well they are nothing more than subjective opinions. We could nuke the earth and that’s no more right or wrong than anything else, but if you want the species to go on, then it would be wrong from your point of view. Others may see humans as a disease and support extinction for some other goal. There is no right or wrong; just one big “whatever party” :occasion-balloons: If it were not so, then there would be no point to it.

Krishnamurti said “Here is my secret: I do not care what happens.” I can’t get there yet because I care about things still.

Joke:

The oldest man on earth was interviewed and asked his secret. He responded, “I don’t argue.” The interviewer said “Naw, that can’t be it. There must be something else.” The old man said, “Yes, you’re probably right.”

Not caring what happens is truly a secret power.

Alan Watts said “You better learn to let go because there’s no way of hanging on.”

Grandma said “Everything comes out in the wash.”

Yes, they desire things. They want to survive and so they create antibiotics to train bacteria to be resistant to everything they can thrown at them. Likewise they create laws to make smarter criminals. Evolution works against everything we do because every uke needs a nage.

If the universe were rewound and started over, it would happen in some different way.

Randomness. It just happened this way.

There is no ought.

A force is a duality: something imposing a force and something receiving a force. Energy is +/-. Everything is made of the same “stuff” just different frequencies, polarities, states. A force in spacetime is the same as a moves of a bishop in chess: there are rules that pertain only to that game. Forces do not exist outside of spacetime because we need space and time in order to have a force.

Even if everyone sees the same thing, that still doesn’t mean the thing is objective, but just that everyone’s subjectivity happened to align.

If a gigantic asteroid is about to smash into Earth such that all conscious minds [like mine] are obilterated, that is somehow different [for me] than when the next gigantic asteroid smashes into the planet with absolutely no conscious minds around to even be aware of it. The same objects are moving and colliding, but no one around to react to the collision. No one around cognizant of the fact that it happened at all.

Always it comes back to the marvel of matter evolving into mind somehow able to become aware of itself as mindful matter. And then the part where there either is or is not actual human autonomy embedded in it all.

My point though is in imagining a unviverse in which the brute facticity of existence is what it is [is what it must be] but there is no actual awareness in existence to know this. No God. No human minds. No anything at all able to point this existence out and to explore why and how it came to be what it is. How could “meaning” be relevant at all [or even exist] in universe in which there is nothing or no one able to broach it in the first place? Conscious minds can’t change the meaning of something when there are no conscious minds around able to bring something up in the first place.

If swans reflected the highest form of consciousness on the planet what would black and white mean to them? How would their reactions not be entirely embedded in instinct? With human minds however meaning evolves to the point that this is discussed philosophically. Or scientifically. Meaning without the minds of men and women would seem to be a very different thing. Or it could be argued that it couldn’t exist at all. But that is still predicated on the extent to which our minds have some measure of autonomy embedded in them. Otherwise even the meaning exchanged by philosophers would be no less a reflection of nature unfolding only as it ever could have.

I can only react to this by pondering the existential implications of it in regard to actual human interactions. If someone asks, “what does it mean to be a virtuous human being?”, different individuals will give us different answers. So, in regard to your point of view here, how would you contribute to the discussion?

Meaning or no meaning in what sense? And how to understand the relationship between “I” and “laws of nature” in that particular context?

You believe that…

…but how on earth would you go about demonstrating that this is in fact true given all of the “unknown unknowns” that you are no less as entangled in as all the rest of us?

Sure, maybe. Maybe lots and lots and lots of things. But how are philosophers to react to this in terms of “meaning”? What does “maybe” mean here? And how can we determine if the meaning that we impart to it is a meaning that we constructed of our own “free will”?

Meaning about what though? In what context? And how would our assumptions not be predicated entirely on all that we do not know about the existence of existence itself?

The part about what we think we mean is either able to be connected to the world that we live in or it can’t. In America, many are asking themselves, “what do the mid-term elections mean?” What do they tell us about the future of America? How is meaning understood here in terms of what is present and what is absent?

There are lots and lots of empirical facts here that everyone is able to acknowledge are true. But what the facts are said to tell us about America…? Meaning here becomes considerably more ambiguous and problematic. And political.

The burdon of proof here is applicable to all of us. We all make arguments about what we believe is true, but are we able to substantiate our claim such that it is demonstrated that all rational men and women are obligated in turn to sahre it?

Then it’s just a matter of being specific regarding what we do believe is true.

Note where this is the case. All I ask of you [of everyone] is to demonstrate how and why what you believe is true “in your head” is in fact in sync with with an ontological understanding of existence itself.

That’s what may well be impossible. Why? Because we have no seeming capacity to even grasp if the human mind is capable of grasping this.

Instead, what I encounter over and again here are folks who make claims like yours. They believe something is true, but all we have are the assumptions they make about the components of either “human reality” or of “existence” itself.

And that’s more a manifestation of human psychology to me. But we seemingly have no capacity in turn to determine if human psychology itself is not just more dominoes toppling over onto each other re the ubiquitous “laws of matter”.

The logic of existence? You are actually convinced that your understanding of these relationships reflects the most rational manner in which to grasp existence itself.

Even though there are countless others propagating their own TOE around the globe. All of them convinced “in their head” that they and only they really know what they are talking about.

It always puzzles me how they can not grasp this as a psychological component of “I” in a profoundly mysterious universe.

In other words, “winning” or “losing” here is always relative to a particular set of initial assumptions. Which I then suggest revolve around my own understanding of the existential juncture that is identity, value judgments and political power. Out in a particular world understood from a particular point of view. And then the extent to which logic is even applicable in the is/ought world.

But what does randomness mean in a world that is beyond wholly grasping? If, in fact, it is.

And you need to bring it down to earth. In regard to, say, the Caravan that is marching through Mexico toward the U.S. border, how would you explain/describe randomness to the folks involved here?

I agree. But that doesn’t make all the conflicts that revolve around the fact of sustaining it go away.

What does it mean for infinitesimally tiny specks of existence like you and I to talk about “common sesne” given the staggering vastness of the universe? the multiverse? Sure, some are able to just shrug that part off and argue that their own frame of mind is the right one. But then we’re back to the manner in which human psychology itself comes into play here. Not that any particular argument is the right one but that this argument does in fact exist so why not your argument?

Yes, it is always fascinating to speculate about these things. But to speak of them as though you can actually know what is in fact true here? Well, that is something I no longer imagine as within my own reach.

On the other hand, what is rocket science next to grasping the precise relationship between Existence, God and human interactions? More to the point [mine] grappling with this in regard to a particular context that most will be familiar with.

You say things like this…

…as though only a fool couldn’t grasp how truly [and simply] logical your explanation is. As though “common sense” itself tells us these things.

Which [again] leads me to speculate that it is not the substance of these claims that matters to you as much as the certainty with which you embrace them. You know these things. You are able to subsume the psychological “I” into this knowledge and then congratulate yourself on having figured it all out.

Or, rather, that is the manner in which “I” – “here and now” – have come to think about it.

This seems more about how “technically” philosophers make a distinction between “subjective” and “objective”. Whereas I am more interested in exploring how, in whatever manner you make this distinction, it is made applicable in turn to conflicting assessments of what is deemed to be rational behavior in any particular context. Flipping a coin and it coming up either heads or tails is rational in the sense that it will be one or the other. But if someone switches the conversation to Anton Chigurh’s decision to leave the fate of someone living or dying to a flip of the coin – how rational or virtuous is that?

Same with the government and dollars and gold. There are the facts that can be ascertained and there are the arguments about what the facts tell us about rational or irrational behavior.

Okay, but that still doesn’t bring them down out of the scholastic clouds. In what particular context might someone feel these things? And if their feelings are intertwined in all of the variables that encompass the universe how is that not just another rendition of determinism? They feel what they do only because they were never able not to.

I mean particular contexts in which your arguments are fleshed out existentially. A text that is illustrated with actual human interactions that we can all react to.

What aspects of these interactions are able to be confirmed as true for all of us and what aspects are embodied more in “existential leaps” to one set of values rather than another.

Many who believe in God argue that He is 1] omniscient 2] omnipotent and 3] omnipresent. And that He is the creator of All There Is. How then would you [would anyone] go about arguing that these assumptions are either demonstrably true, demonstrably false or, if demonstrably true, that God’s point of view is still subjective.

Only no one will ever be killed or be arrested for murder if they choose chocolate over vanilla or Coke over Pepsi. There are conflicting goods and then there are conflicting goods.

The fact of a particular abortion is independent of what any individual thinks is true. Here there is a right answer. But in a No God world, the consequences for mere mortals being able or unable to establish a “right anwer” in regard to the morality of it is, in my view, more in sync with the components of my own argument. And the hole I have tumbled down into as a result of believing this argument is reasonable. All I can then do is to search out the arguments of those who don’t think like me.

Or they may genuinely embrace his order as in fact “the right thing to do”. My only suggestion is that both Trump and those who either support or don’t support him, create and/or react to particular orders [his or their own] given the manner in which I construe the components of my moral philosophy “here and now”.

Then the part where we grapple with what philosophers are in fact able to discern about all of this essentially/objectively/necessarily.

Then the part where, whatever it is that individual philosophers do discern about all of this [in venues such as this], they were ever able not to given some measure of autonomy.

I’m still not following you.

This part:

“…so if it were wrong to murder, then it wouldn’t be possible to murder. Since it is possible, then its not objectively wrong.”

As a general description of human interactions revolving around a particular killing deemed legally to be a murder, whether it is right or wrong is embedded in the points of view derived from a particular historical, cultural and experiential context. Some will argue that though this killing was possible it doesn’t make it either right or wrong. Necessarily in other words. All that can be establish is that the killing did in fact occur. And possibly there will be enough evidence that no reasonable man or women could doubt who did the killing. But whether this killing can be justified morally as “the right thing to do” is the part that “here and now” doesn’t seem possible to establish. Not from my frame of mind.

It wouldn’t be possible to murder someone if there were no laws against it. But how to decide which killings ought to be illegal?

Where does philosophical logic end and all that we don’t know about existence begin?

Tell that to actual flesh and blood human beings who grapple with what they ought to do over and over and over again. If only from the cradle to the grave.

There is what you need to do to achieve some goal in the either/or world. But there seems to be only what you think you ought to do in the is/ought world. And the extent to which others are not troubled by the manner in which I introduce the components of my own argument.

Then I’m just back to this: “I have no idea what ‘on earth’ something like this means.” How does this “force” pertain to coins/money being exchanged in a just or an unjust manner in any particular community?

When the either/or world begins to segue into the is/ought world what is the practical significance of this duality? And how is it related to the arguments voiced by the hard determinists pertaining to the laws of matter in space and time said to be immutable and applicable to all matter. Including brain matter.

Yes, but with respect to the either/or world, our subjective observations of actual physical things can be demonstrated with considerably more physical evidence than the observations we make regarding how we ought to react to this thing that we are seeing. Thus an aborted fetus can be placed on a table and all rational men and women can agree that this particular “thing” is in fact a dead fetus.

But what can they then tell us is “in fact” true about the morality of aborting it?

That is the distinction I make between an objective truth and a subjective opinion.

Consciousness is not a complicated form of matter, but matter is a simple form of consciousness. There cannot be discontinuities between mind and matter or else one of them are conjured by magic from nothing since “complexity” cannot be an answer to where something came from, but instead, consciousness is inherent in matter to varying degrees according to complexity. So, matter isn’t unconscious, but less conscious.

As I said previously, there is no discontinuity of consciousness along the spectrum of complexity, so there was never a universe without consciousness of some degree.

The earth is conscious of the sun, evidenced by the fact that it interacts with it. If the sun were the only thing existing in the universe, then it would not give light or have gravity or any properties whatsoever because properties only exist in accordance to what kind of a you you are as a beholder of the sun.

Meaning is only relative to the particular game you’re playing and not something that objectively exists. Meaning regarding black and white swans relies on the existence of black and white swans in relation to the observer that observes them.

If you want to be virtuous, then you need to become an inhuman machine. I think “virtuous human” is an oxymoron because even if someone were to be perfectly virtuous, then he’d either be contaminated with purity or become a mindless machine incapable of transgression and unable to be virtuous because of it. Trading iron chains for gold chains doesn’t produce freedom.

Because if matter were not a simple form of consciousness then we’re left explaining how complexity of matter engenders consciousness from nothing. How does complexly arranged dead stuff = life? Does life just magically appear like a witch’s brew upon adding the last ingredient? It’s much easier for me to believe the life-property is inherent to everything and the degree to which it is alive is a function of complexity. So it’s not that you are alive and the rock is dead, but you are more alive than the rock… or maybe it’s that you are alive in many more ways because you’re perceptive in many more aspects of the universe.

I’m just saying that because there exists one scenario in which it’s beneficial to kill me that it means you cannot have an overarching law that states killing is always wrong.

Should we assume the meaning of something exists and require empirical demonstration that the meaning is absent?
Or should we assume things have no inherent meaning and require empirical demonstration of meaning?

I’m just saying you’re putting the burden on me to prove something does not exist while I think it’s more prudent to assume nonexistence until existence has been substantiated. Do you disagree? How do you prove something is objectively meaningful? (That is, meaningful outside of all contexts.) You can’t because meaning is only meaningful in relation to context. Meaning is subjective by definition.

Existence is the relationship of subject and object. Subject exists in relation to object and object exists in relation to subject. Existence of existence would be the case where existence is the object that exists in relation to some subject.

What do the elections mean in relation to the future of america? They don’t mean anything objectively, but only with regard to the future of america.

Newton didn’t release all his ideas at first because he said the people just weren’t ready. Who knows if we know all he discovered. If 1 out of 400 people are able to perceive something, then how on earth is the 1 able to empower the other 399 in order to share it?

I’m pretty sure all my claims are rooted in logic. I’m not claiming special insight that only I am privy to or suggesting magic as the cause of things.

Neurons are much different than dominoes.

If I’m being illogical, then show me the illogical part, but all you’re doing is saying that I should take pause by the fact that I’m confident 1+1=2; that my confidence somehow means I’m wrong. I’ve been confident about many things and have been wrong and I’ve been confident about many things and have been right, so confidence doesn’t mean anything; either it makes sense or it doesn’t.

Yeah, I guess so, if I’m reading that right. Even if everyone agreed, it would still only be a collection of unanimous subjective interpretations.

Because the caravan is a larger organism, it’s a little easier to predict what it will do, but increasingly harder to predict what the smaller elements will do until we come down to the fundamental particles which are absolutely random.

It just means that sustaining life is an arbitrary goal, but you can pretend it’s not; you can pretend it’s meaningful because it’s completely arbitrary whether you do or not.

You mean what about the argument that this only seems right in my head? When I listen to Alan Watts I sometimes wonder if I am the stupid one or if he is. Is it that he doesn’t know what he is talking about or that I can’t see what he’s saying? I don’t know how to tell and this is why genius and stupidity are often confused.

Then why are you seeking something that you know for sure that you cannot find?

I think you’re overcomplicating it. You’re deifying “existence” and making the concept of “God” incomprehensible by definition and therefore proclaiming any conclusion drawn invalid on the basis of a strawman you put together for the very purpose of stifling revelation.

It’s as if you’re saying, “I’m not going to accept any answer you give because these things are to difficult to understand and you can’t presume to understand them because if anyone could, then it would trivialize everything which means I’m searching for something that I’ve defined as impossible to find because finding it would mean it wasn’t worthy of being found.”

Most of what I say is just parroting Alan Watts who is parroting some ancient people. My name literally means “someone who bumbles into things” so I either stumble upon something someone said or I stumble upon a revelation myself, but either way it wasn’t anything I did that deserves congratulations.

How about the cops who left the decision of whether to arrest someone up to a coin flip and then, even though the flip designated not to arrest, they arrest her anyway? usatoday.com/story/news/nat … 847470002/

That’s not very virtuous if you ask me, but asking me is subjective.

It is determinism, but not pre-determinism because the fundamental events are random (causeless) and unpredictable.

We have refuted that in another thread. Omni+anything is impossible.

omniscient - god couldn’t know what it’s like not to know something.

omnipotent - god couldn’t be small and nimble while being large and immovable at the same time.

omnipresent - if god were everywhere, then he wouldn’t exist for the same reason that if a whole magnet were north with no south, that north also wouldn’t exist. In order for god to exist as god, there needs to be a place that isn’t god.

Did he create it from nothing? How? Obviously there was potential in nothing to be something, but potential isn’t nothing, but something. If god is all there is and he created something, then he created it from himself because there is nothing else to work with.

God is the subject and not-God is the object that God is observing, so it’s a subjective situation where God exists in relation to not-God and not-God exists in relation to God. God + not-God is the object that has no observer, so it’s an objective situation with no subjective lens.

Yes but the preference that murder is worse than choosing vanilla is the same preference; it’s just something you happen to fancy.

The empirical evidence so far seems to indicate that you want to be in the hole: everything must have meaning and that meaning must be so important that no one could understand it because if anyone could understand it, it wouldn’t be special enough for your idea of how things should be. So you’ve embarked on a voyage in search of what can’t be found so you can lament not being able to find it, lol, probably to expiate your sins or whatever guilt from being maladjusted to a screwed up society. I can relate. I gleaned a lot from Alan on this topic: as long as I suffer, everything is ok.

That’s very wise!

Let’s say the speed limit is 55 because that’s a fast as your car will go. That’s an objective limit because it’s independent of observation.
But if the speed limit were set to 55 by the gov, then the limit depends on your ability to obey it and isn’t an objective limit.

Murder is possible and is only wrong because we say it’s wrong, just like the speed limit. If it were objectively wrong, it wouldn’t be possible to transgress it.

Falling off a ladder results in injury. It’s not like you’d slip and the supreme court would have to decide whether or not falling is the right thing to do. If God or the universe or nature or some objective authority expected us to do something, then it wouldn’t be possible not to do it.

We’ve merely decided that it’s better for everyone if we demonized murder so we wouldn’t have crazies out killing random people because we might be one who may be killed and we just happen to want to continue living.

Self-inspection is always an infinite regression, so there is no place where what we know ends and what we don’t know begins.

Right.

Relative to some goal (Living long, getting rich, making god happy, etc).

The church population is still quite high I think.

Duality underpins everything because everything needs context to manifest. So we have the thing in the context of the not-thing and that’s dualism. But because the two are in a codependent relationship where one cannot exist without the other, they are one thing.

Hard determinists are wrong because randomness has been proven to exist.

Right, the fetus is on the table independent of all observation, but the morality of it depends on observation.

Okay, but are you actually able to demonstrate this such that both the scientific and the philosophical communties react, “Wow, why didn’t we think of that?!”

Bottom line [mine]: that you claim to know this is one thing, that you are able to substantiate how and why all rational men and women are obligated to know this too…?

That’s where I will always take speculation of this sort: out into a world that encompasses our day to day subsistence embedded in our day to day interactions to sustain it. In other words, a conscious awareness of what? Of what particular relationships in what particular context construed from what particular points of view?

Then this part:

Yes, you said that but what is there really left from my end but this: What on earth does that mean?

This is just another “world of words” to me. There is nothing [that I can discern] connecting them to the world that we live in other than the assumptions you have concocted “in your head”.

How then does this relate to an issue like animal rights or abortion or the role of government? How is your own moral narrative acted out in your interactions with others? Interactions that come into conflict because you can’t make opinions meet about that which is said to constitute virtue?

Again, I have no real understanding of how you would go about substantiating this beyond just making the claims themselves.

As a moral nihilist [in a No God world] I agree. And sans “right makes might” that would seem to leave two alternatives: might makes right or moderation, negotiation and compromise. The rule of law.

But you provide no actual existential context. Meaning is subjective in that “I” is a genetic and memetic construct from the cradle to the grave. But there is clearly meaning that can be conveyed [in the either/or world] such that it would be deemed objective. For example, what does it mean to perform an abortion? This can in fact be described whereby the meaning is applicable to all of us.

On the other hand, if we live in an entirely determined universe, even human subjectivity would seem to be just another mechanical aspect of the interaction of matter.

Yes, but if both are matter and matter is inherently in sync with that which explains existence itself, nothing is ever anything other than what it must be. Mind here is just a mystery that science and philosophy continue to grapple with.

Yes, and that is exactly what folks like James S. Saint once noted in turn. Only he constructed his own fantastical conclusions out of “definitional logic”. Given his definitions embedded in his premises then [of course] his conclusions.

What I do is to note that in regard to 1] the is/ought world and 2] the really Big Questions, we do not appear able to reach a definitive conclusion regarding what either does or does not “make sense”. Just different sets of assumptions regarding what the words in the arguments themselves are said to mean.

Then it seems [to me] to come down to this:

From my point of view this always comes down to our ability to connect the dots between what we think is true in our heads and coming up with ways in which to demonstrate that all rational men and women are likely to agree.

Then back to the gap between the either/or world and the is/ought world.

And then the gap [in the either/or world] between things able to be proven and things that revolve more around sheer speculation and conjecture.

This part:

Because there is still that gap between what I think I know [and cannot know] and the realization that in a world of contingency, chance and change, I can never really now for certain what awaits me in the way of new experiences, new relationships and access to new ideas.

Providing of course that human autonomy is not essentially an illusion.

None of us really seem to have any way in which to know for sure if our own point of view either oversimplifies or overcomplicates existence. Why? Because an understanding of existence itself may well be far beyond the reach of the human mind.

No, I’m saying I will accept an answer that someone gives to a particular question given their capacity to demonstrate why I should accept it.

What else is there for any of us?

Feom my perspective virtue is an existential contraption rooted historically and culturally in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. And always embedded in a profoundly problematic interaction of genes and memes.

And subjectivity here may well be just a psychological illusion.

The empirical evidence is what it is. If you embrace the “natural right” of the fetus to live, then women are forced to give birth. If you embrace the “political right” of the women to choose an abortion then the fetus is killed.

The hole that I am in revolves around the assumption that philosophers and scientists cannot devise an argument that makes these conflicting goods go away. And that “I” here is “existential contraption”. And that ultimately right and wrong comes down to those who have the power to enforce a particular political agenda.

Thus, all I can do is to note how others are able to convince themselves that they are not in a hole here.

Heck I don’t know. Alan Watts said it in the late 60s and it’s plastered all over youtube with 1000s of views.

Listen from 23:19 to 25:20.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb_fbWxCMEo[/youtube]

See, all I’m saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness, whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals. See? What they want to do is to say everything is kind of bleagh! Whereas what I want to say is hooray, you know? Life is a good show!

He’s saying it depends how you want to look at it: do you want to put the world up or put it down?

He also said of the 4 models of the universe: Ceramic, Automatic, Organic, Dramatic, that the atheistic fully-automatic model was the dumbest because he couldn’t see how life could come from nonlife and intelligence from dumb junk. That seems reasonable to me and rather than having to explain how life comes from nonlife, which seems like an impossible problem, just have degrees of life. It fits Occam’s razor.

So it’s the simplest solution, it’s the most logical solution, and it’s the most edifying solution. The alternatives are more complex, require more difficult beliefs, and require that humans either be mere machines or reprobate beings in need of “saving”.

I think my assessment is pretty convincing, it complies with all rules of logic, and it doesn’t require believing in a creation god or some magic that bestows the life property on lifeless matter that has reached a certain complexity. It simply posits that everything is part of the same thing and there are no discontinuities between things.

It means what it means I guess. Consciousness doesn’t end with decreasing complexity. Whatever it is that causes consciousness is already in the matter. Consciousness doesn’t get created suddenly by complexity, but the consciousness that already exists gets more complex.

I don’t know how it relates to that, but I’m just saying the best way to become virtuous is to become a robot.

Some old chinese fella said virtue is not virtue, because it draws attention to itself as virtue, therefore it isn’t virtue. True virtue doesn’t draw attention to itself, therefore it is virtue. Virtuous acts can only be done for selfish reasons and therefore they can never be virtuous.

The only possible moral foundation is pure selfishness.

We shouldn’t endeavor to be virtuous when making decisions because that leads to arrogance. I don’t want animals to suffer. I’m not being virtuous; I just don’t like it. I also don’t like being flogged and it has nothing to do with virtue. I don’t like what I don’t like.

Thinking in terms of virtue is quite dangerous because that’s how the atrocities of righteous wars are committed: “We’re doing God’s work!”

What form of substantiation would you accept?

Who enforces the rule of law? The might making the right. Where does the power come from? The numbers of the people and majority constitutes “might”.

It’s a question meant to determine the default position we should take: should we assume meaning exists and require demonstration that it doesn’t or should we assume meaning doesn’t exist and require demonstration that it does?

Should we assume god exists until there is reason to believe he doesn’t or should we assume god doesn’t exist until there is reason to believe he does? Which is the best default position?

Should we assume unicorns exist until there is reason to believe they don’t or should we assume unicorns don’t exist until there is reason to believe they do? Which is the best default position? How could I prove unicorns don’t exist?

If there is no evidence that intrinsic meaning exists, then why start with that position and then require others to disprove what there is no evidence for?

Yes of course, we’re like robots, but the life property is in the matter. If all we are is chemical reactions, then chemical reactions are more than we think they are.

Ok, James was wrong and you’ve identified his error. Where is my error? Don’t say I talk in the clouds and need to bring it down to earth because I don’t know how I can learn my error from that. Show me specifically where I’m going wrong.

From my point of view it usually comes down to someone being too proud to admit they were wrong (not saying you are, but just saying). That is why Max Planck said science progresses funeral by funeral: it’s not that the old are converted to new ways of thinking (because that would mean they would have to admit that were wrong), but that they eventually die and a new generation takes over. The problem is we’re technologically in the 21st century and neurologically in the stone ages. Our animal brains can’t divorce logic from emotion and our technology evolved faster than our brains to handle it.

“Ought” is only relative to a goal that we made up.

There is no proof of anything, but only a level of substantiation that you’re willing to accept.

There is no such thing as a rational person who can be a judge because “rational” is only relational to some standard that is completely fabricated. Being well-adjusted to a profoundly sick world is no measure of rationality. When you say “a claim that all rational people would accept”, you’re saying a group of people who are well-adjusted to a standard that you simply made up should be the judge of the rationality of something that I made up.

If you knew what awaited you, then it wouldn’t be an experience, but a memory. You can’t have a game if you already know who the winner is. If it’s mate in 5, then we give up and start a new game where it’s not obvious who will win. Not knowing what’s going to happen is conditional to experience.

Anatomy is only relative to spacetime and it is an illusion in that respect. Is a virtual world an illusion? The virtual world exists relative to the computer the same way the real world exists relative to the spacetime construct. Nothing that exists inside the spacetime construct would exist outside the spacetime construct the same way that things inside the virtual world do not exist outside the virtual world, but are real inside the virtual world.

Can we have a positive without a negative? Or how can we have a thing without a contrasting background of nothing? No thing can exist in and of itself. If existence has any meaning whatsoever, it is always in terms of something else. When my father didn’t understand someone, he would always ask “as opposed to what?” because knowing what someone is not talking about makes it easier to figure out what they are talking about. What a thing is, is defined by what it is not, and therefore every thing that exists only exist in terms of everything that it is not, which means every thing is conditional to everything else and cannot be an objective thing.

Sure, if it seems sensible, you should accept it (not sure you’d have a choice since I couldn’t believe in santa claus if I wanted to), but if it seems nonsensical, you should be able to point out the parts that are that way so I can either help you understand or realize it’s time to abandon the theory in pursuit of the truth.

But mostly you’re saying if my ideas are so great, then why hasn’t the community caught on, but I think Max Planck answered that and Alan Watts talked a lot about fashions in science, implying that it’s not currently fashionable to think this way (science has embraced absolute atheism in order to combat christianity, so any allusion to panvitalism is out of fashion until christianity is finally purged and then we’ll find science gravitating toward the void left by the theists.)

These ideas are 1000s of years old and I am not their genesis. The only thing I credit myself with is finally getting my head around what Alan was talking about, and it only came after 2 years of obsessive struggling. There is nearly zero chance that someone coming from a western background would be able to understand eastern philosophy after only a session or two because the amount of deconstruction and reconstruction is so vast that it requires actual neuron growth or rearrangement which simply takes time to happen.

I agree.

Yep.

The hole is also a contraption.

So we have a contraption caught in a contraption because of contraptions and the contraption can’t believe other contraptions aren’t hiding at the bottom of a contraption to escape contraptions. My question is who is it that realizes all the contraptions are contraptions? If contraptions exist, then someone made them.