Outside of "thought"

When the tree falls in the woods, the sound is beyond thought, but we believe it is. However, this is only because we already know of sound. Ergo, to deny is to know what one denies. When we deny the fanciful, we deny imagination, not a thing known as is the sound of what falls.

Ergo, what is “outside” thought is always first in it.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Wittgenstein (Tractatus 7)

  • Outside of “thought” -
    is itself within thought.

There is no escape from thoughts.

This “Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is there to hear it?” was supposedly linked to Berkeley whose main interest was to denounce materialism and to prove and insist God exists.

Theists like Berkeley claimed, God is the only absolute that exists independently “outside of thoughts”

But re Wittgenstein, since God is outside thoughts, then one cannot speak of it, thereof one must be silent, i.e. literally shut up on any claims of God.

Despite that theists must shut up with the idea of God, they continue to insist falsely God is real to the extent of delivering holy texts to chosen messengers, [in some cases] with commands for believers to kill non-believers.


The only way that God is real is if that is another word for Universe as per pantheism

Why not confine the term ‘Universe’ as in Science which is very objective.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe
This is empirical and no psychological elements are involved.

However there are psychological elements involved in the Pantheism = Universe = God relationship.
The Pantheism = Universe = God association is constructed to soothe the existential Angst but albeit in a lesser psychological degree as compared to theism. This is related to the subconscious subliminal instinctive fear of death [mentioned in another post] in a range of degrees.

Whilst the term ‘universe’ in Science is related to the Scientific Method, the term ‘universe’ in terms of pantheism is an idea which is illusory. The scientific-based universe cannot be equated with a theological-based universe.

There is the usual contradiction, there.
Any claims of what is unthinkable, or outside of thought, are equally prevy to something one must speak about, therefore, both the claim for the existence of God, and the claim for asserting that which is unthinkable are absolutely identical.

So the ground of the later can not be that which is identical to it, since God is defined as that which is unthinkable.
Here is the failure of Wittgenstein’s positive claim, it reduces to a baseless absolute rhetoric re: god, and how it is conceived, vis, that which is unthinkable.

To note: to deny the unthinkable, is to assert the absolute thinkable, which makes little sense, since here, ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’ are equovocate as well. ; Or used similarly: to form a resemblance.

The derivitive for that, is that the inside is hypothetically divided into both the knowable and the thinkable, whereas the outside is merely indefinable.

Therefore outside of thought is outside of knowledge, therefore it should be not spoken about.
However it is not undefinable, since it has been very well defined, characteristically, therefore it can be both: thought, known, hence spoken about.

It is here, that Russel is disappointed in Wittgenstein’s mantra, it can not get rid of the very definable idea, despite its non appearing as sensibility, via data, ( sense data) . But what of miracles, or hallucinations?
Hallucinations, on psychological basis, can not verify absolute rationality or the lack of them , merely appealing. to claims in terms of searching for the absolute.
Russell’s claims of not being a Christian falls on deaf ears, for that reason.
Perhaps he was older and wiser later on to release his youthful enthusiasm for naive realism and common sense philosophy of the early youthful Wittgenstein, was premature, and that is his reason for rejecting the later Wittgenstein.

Did you mean that we believe that it is not beyond thought? I ask, give the but, which seems contradicted by what follows it. Or could that first sentence have used ‘and’ instead`?

IOW we are first immersed in the illusion then out of it? Or something else.

What if the tree falling in the forest lands right on top of you? There you are pinned underneath it…succumbing to a slow and painful death. What of being inside or outside of thoughts then?

Thank you for coinciding with, and thereby upholding, the spirit of philosophy, in some way, rather than with the mere weapons of verbal battery.

The analogy between the sound of the tree falling when we aren’t there, and what is but is not thought, is thought. Whether or not it thinks anything is not thereby decided. If it does, then what it seems to want to think, is. However, perhaps it can not think what it seems to want to.

Wittgenstein says, if I do not know exactly what I think, do I thereby think nothing? Perhaps the analogy, above, is not thought entirely. Heidegger says, what is most thoughtworthy concerning thought is that we are not yet thinking.

This is not hereby stipulated. But, rather, that what is denied, is defined as already properly thought. The standard of thinking is the obvious or clear and distinct understanding in the sound of the tree falling.

That is because materialism was for Berkeley the theory of hidden extension posited by Leibnitz and others in the calculus. Newton, already, stipulated the Berkeleylian view. Which is that the calculus may only describe, rather than say what the hupo-thesis, the look inside the phenomena or thing itself truly is. Berkeley denied the monads.

Rather, he said, God always thinks the things even when no one else does. The world is the mind of God. “The horse is in the stable”, ergo, he upheld common sense.

Thusly, Wittgenstein says, Solipsism is the correct position. This means, not deity fullness of being or absolute as fullness, and not common sense or the inbetween shadow and sun. In this, he is more radical than Husserl in his phenomenology. Taken in the strongest interpretation, he outstrippes all phenomonologies (this strong sense is, however, not obviously justified considering Wittgenstein’s general output and the sounds he was absorbed by throughout his life.)

Or, you will kill them? Of course, first one would say, only make them harmless, and then, if they can not be made harmless, kill them for the sake of peace and reason. However, you invite this rebuke which is boring to deliver, since you should have already considered it, had you paid tribute to reason rather than your baby god or ego arbiter’s idealistic and narrow minded whims. In Leo Strauss, we see the right way to approach this difficulty: one must see that there is more than one kind of rationality.

As a preliminary indication I would start from this statement: God means Rationality. Rationality means there is obviousness or clear and distinct understanding which one can reason from as a basis. This basis is called knowing, but if it is doubted we call it thinking.

Compared to God, as theists should think if they actually believe in such a being, everyone on earth is infinitely puny, so it is arrogance for a being to think it’s god who asks US to kill, obviously, knowing they are FOREVER defined an infinitely puny, they should not leave the killing to anyone but god.

It is arrogance to believe that god is working through the forever infinitely puny. If someone is muderdered it should be god and only god, not a proxy, and not a possession.

Do you really want to know why people are atheists?

Because they are empathic, rather than psychopathic. They are empathic rather than narcissistic.

And most importantly, every being to the depths of their being knows that a single consent violation against their consent is one to many.

This has happened to billions of beings.

People always say that the most important attributes of god are omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence.

This is a lie. EVERY being in all of existence only cares about the one attribute no religion has gaven to god (because it’s true and falsifiable instantly) - omnibenevolence.

You know why religions don’t teach that god is omnibenevolent?

Because nobody would believe in god.

They’d check whether their consent is being violated, right then and right now, find out that it is, and disprove god in a fraction of a second.

God is the supreme consent violator.

God is great, god is good, let HIM! (Really?) violate our consent forever.

Now let’s say hypothetically that god is all knowing. That makes god the only being in existence who has ZERO faith!!!

Jesus asks us to be perfect like the father is perfect, meaning people of no faith – blam!! Irreconcilable contradiction, negating gods existence. MagsJ is censoring me so I can’t give the whole proof.

I would identify God with rationality or the human essence, namely reason. At first this means the availability of “kinds” of things, Descartes says, the kinds are clear and distinct understandings as the basis for building up to a principle of the good order of all things, of scientific knowledge which is wisdom or good for human beings. If your doubt comes in, we are like someone silent after an embarrassing or off-colour remark has been made, we are then held captive by mere thought rather than knowing or God’s promise for science as wisdom.

We must be guarded against mere logical difficulties, about how far we allow them to drive us in the track, “logic” can never be decisive for genuine investigation. Because logic is not the basic datum we have before us, it is a specific modification of logos (speech) alongside others.

In Hegel thinking becomes knowing in this sense, this is the meaning of the talk of “bees” in Kojeve. Such is: the Rational as the Real. The denial of the “unthinkable” as beyond = the basic bent of any realism.

Here you presuppose the knowledge of inside and outside, as over and against the freak charm of our leading claim (taken over from Heidegger): being is unrepeatable!

Definitions can be merely verbal, not connected to genuine intuitions. Speaking is not always genuine, often it has no witness, but more often a being carried along by the public windbag, and saying what others say, to the airhead within each one, rages over all parks, coffee shops with the scent of fresh roasted beans, and big meetings to discuss young scripts at the Hotel Mondial, Paris, with Weinstein .

The identity of agenda and noun force us to set aside any theory of value-free facts. This allows one to ask about nihilism as the change of all agendas. On the other hand, if we stipulate that common sense is prior to solipsism, the agenda of the whole must be taken into account. Since common sense, that of each country, moves in the world, not only in what is now here before each one, but the assumption: “the horse is in the stable” is already at work.

This reflection concerning where the extreme experience happens, or if there is extreme experience, is the issue of a necessary (final cause, the “why” of a country), but not the question about the status of sense data.

We believe “it is”, we believe it exists. Common sense acts as though, if we were there, we would hear it, is the same as: it is making the sound when we aren’t there.

I hear a sound, knowledge of that sound. If the sound is called into doubt in some way, thought. The sound is thought.

Common sense finds touch problematic, touch seems at the basis of all the senses. Schopenhauer says: all the sense refer to touch. Locke, at first, thinks touch as a primary quality, corpuscularity, but later, he sees this as an error. When primary and secondary quality are challenged as essentially distinguishable, we have thought. Heidegger says here: the soul is not a gremlin, rushing about the body, rather, the we are bodily. Nietzsche: The body is alive. Aristotle, psuke and life are the same, and life is the “form” (invisible drive or instinct) of the body. Socrates: One can not see life in a mirror.

One can replace “kill” with “make harmless”, at least so long as one is not faced with a strong military or lethal prowess. Either way, one would say, this is the rational course for our laws to take. Ergo, one appeals to God or rationality. What you seem to exclude is direct rationality, ergo, revelation. The reason of one individual having mastered the art of reason, has for intermediary, the built up reason of the tradition “summa ratio”, between it and rationality proper (ergo, the mind of God). So, if you say, let us stick with one human being’s reason, or the rational tradition, you thereby assume tacitly there is a region beyond this, but you say, it is better not to risk unsound stumbling in the dark of what is not yet learned. Rationality, or God, is still presupposed as the unreachable standard.

From where is this law, or “should”, of yours layed down? Common sense of an Englishman in the second decade of a century measured from the birth of a God-man, that is, from a society that measures itself in mystical terms and places itself in being in these terms? Or, form a remote star untouched by human hands where the moral and intellectual development of the young is seen to in a wholly different way?

Because they like the sound of the word? And were peer pressured to believe it was the smart thing to join the faction, though they don’t know what it means, or what they are claiming.

Is wanting a perfect world, and what is really there, the same thing? So, the issue is, what do people think is possible? That gives us the meaning of God, or the rational principle of Justice as the conscience of each one. The attack on the tradition is based on the change in circumstance of human beings which requires a rethinking of justice according to the possibilities. God or rationality remains the standard of the determination. Cardinal Newman wrote, long ago, correspondingly, of the development of doctrine. We have, by the Catholic teaching, only the reflection on the waves, the echo of the mind of God or rationality proper. I’m not a confessor to the Catholic system, rather, I show: this rational or “atheistic” morality is a Catholicism.

Those are technical terms. They can’t be usefully, unless one’s purpose is to cause confusion and to do picayune low-brow polemics, understood in just any way, but only as they were meant by the Medieval science of theology. And even by specific theologians.

From where is such a law put down? The confession of your heart? Is it yet a doctrine, or, has it passed the test of many intelligent auditors and so become rational and godly Dogma?

Isn’t faith the consent? The point being, a horse might not want to drink the best and most healthy water? You make a Dogma, tell us the way to live, but maybe we won’t consent. We must see, this “atheism” faces all the same difficulties, and most of all the lack of awareness of its own dogmatism as what is detestable to the non-confessor of the fiery faith. One is like an ancient seed, buried by a squirrel, that after two thousand years is planted and blooms greener than any tree.

Isn’t it how thoughtless people always behave? What the man in a foreign country does, he thinks irrational. What the man in the other political party does, he thinks idiotic. What his forbears did in another circumstance, insane. His faith is vast, it is ardent.

Ergo, the faithful now call themselves godless. This is essentially a verbal change, but it has accidental content in the circumstantial evolution of human life through the industrial revolutions.

That reply was nonsense.

Why don’t you just state your trick outright instead of hiding it in encryption in a series of 5 posts?

I’m not going to run around in circles with you, this is your thesis:

If someone absolutely beyond all doubt disproves god, all they have done is prove god.

Are the Catholics really that desperate now?

I’ll have it out with you on your thesis if you continue posting about it.

Otherwise, bugger off.

:-$

There are many perspectives to reality.
There is the vulgar common sense, the conventional sense, the social, the theoretical, the practical, the Scientific, the philosophical, etc., and ultimately the Question of Being [Heidegger].

The Wittgenstein’s quote is related to the ultimate question in philosophy, i.e. the Question of Being and thus not relevant for the common vulgar or conventional sense. In the common sense perspective humans need to think and do whatever it takes to survive regardless of the knowledge of their thoughts and thinking.

But God’s thinking, thoughts and existence is supposedly independent of human thoughts.

As explained above, Wittgenstein’s position is not Solipsism.
Wittgenstein’s quote above is related to metaphysics and ontology, i.e. one should never reify something out of nothing i.e. literally shut up the mind, with the idea of an independent ultimate entity.
Note Wittgenstein’s counter to Moore’s ‘there is an independent hand’ in ‘On Certainty’, thus no independent reality to be spoken thereof.

As I had explained elsewhere, the impulse to reify something out of nothing is due to one’s desperate existential psychology.

I thought you prefer and agreed with no verbal attacks?
Btw, I have reservations re your thinking but will shut up on it.

My foundation of morality is that of the Kantian Framework and System.
One of the absolute maxim of the Kantian morality is ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ period, no ifs and no buts.

Thus there will be no killing [in general] of the extremist religious killers but rather there are loads of preventive methods we can carry out to deal with the evil ideology and rewire the brains of the extremists toward good and striving to be near the ideal in the future.

Note I raised this thread;
Do NOT Bash Muslims
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=191104&p=2627469&hilit=do+not+bash+muslims#p2627469

My point;
The foundation of reality-as-it-is is imperatively complimented with thoughts.

Yup

No, to have sounds requires ears and a brain.

Yup. No concepts could possibly describe god (especially since you and god are one and the only thing you could never describe is yourself).

Yup!

Yup :frowning:

If you do that, then you’re left explaining how something came from nothing: how psychology came from a bunch of dead junk.

It’s easier (via occams razor) to assume everything is conscious to varying degrees.

Consciousness isn’t a complicated form of mineral, but mineral is a simple form of consciousness.

Pantheism is the easiest way out.

I tend to agree with this. All that’s needed is to connect the dots.

Wut?

Basically this thread is about gnosticism vs agnosticism.

Gnostic = conceptual, cataphatic knowledge = what god is = a painter applying paint to produce an image
Agnostic = nonconceptual, apophatic knowledge (ie faith) = what god isn’t = sculptor removing stone to reveal an image

There is a big post written about it here viewtopic.php?f=3&t=193866&p=2697490&hilit=cataphatic#p2697490

“Outside of thought” = nonconceptual, apophatic knowledge. Like the knowledge you acquired to beat your heart, which is beyond concept.

Bruce Lee (who desired to be known as a philosopher) instructed students to “learn to forget”, meaning we practice so much that the knowledge becomes part of us and we no longer think about how to make the movement, so the conceptualization is lost.

Nonconceptual knowledge is a higher form of knowledge, and harder to convey.

“Outside of thought” is not outside of the universe, but simply thought that can’t be conceptualized and conveyed.