Yes, excellent.
so i’ll just pick some random statements, jump in, say a few things about them, and then leave you guys to do your thang.
i’d say you two neither agree or disagree on a grander scale than maybe regarding a few single statements scattered throughout (on account of them making sense). but there wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, actually, general agreement or disagreement because neither of you understand each other. not because you to lack the capacity of understanding, but because what you’re saying can’t be understood.
i don’t know if he said that or not, but it’s not important. what is important is that if he did say it, it’s a typical metaphysical statement which makes no sense (which i’ll address in a moment). or, he may have said something else which led you to believe he meant that… but then that’s impossible. one, because one can’t mean nonsense, and two, nothing someone says that is understoood could lead someone else into believing they meant something nonsensical. in other words, you couldn’t take something he said sensibly and infer that he meant that… that premise, i mean.
now this is interesting because it assumes that the statement ‘being is experience’ is also stating that ‘being is its own cause’, or else your objection wouldn’t be what it was. but, there is no way to deduce from his statement that he didn’t also mean that - he doesn’t state or not state it explicitly. so, in addition to the statement being senseless, your interpretation of it yields a conclusion which you couldn’t deduce from it. this means you re-appropriated the statement and understood it in the way you would mean it, and then disagreed with it. but here you’re arguing with yourself. and this goes on much more in these debates then folks realize.
so on to the statement ‘being is experience’ (X, we’ll call it)
behind the indicative mood of this grammar is a hidden violation of logical form, meaning, the things about indicative statements that enable us to understand them and draw inferences from them, are absent. it appears like an empirical proposition about matters of fact, but is actually not at all such a proposition.
take a real empirical proposition: jakob owns a cheeseburger.
now in order to understand this statement, we’d not need to know if it were true or false. we know what it means even if we haven’t a clue whether or not you do own a cheeseburger. but comprehending X goes hand-in-hand with knowing it is true or false. as soon as it is understood, its truth status follows immediately. which is to say, we accept or reject it solely on the basis of what its trying to express, not on any evidence (like whether or not jakob owns a cheeseburger).
the truth status of the statement will be based on the following considerations:
The meaning the words it contains, the definitions of the terms employed, a series of supporting arguments, and one or more ‘thought experiments’.
and yet in each above case, the truth status of the statement will depend entirely on the supposed meaning of yet more words. no evidence is needed, and neither is it possible to devise experiments or observations that could validate the proposition, even in theory.
it is possible to reject the statement right out of hand, but that repudiation won’t be based on evidence, either. most likely it will have been motivated by yet another (perhaps rival) philosophical theory. again, involving yet more words, and still no evidence.
now what you don’t know is that i have just shamelessly plagiarized something written by the late and great rosa lichtenstein… something i have posted at least twice here at ILP. did you get the weird feeling like you’ve read something like that before as you were reading? if so, excellent. it means you read it. if not, excellent. this means you get to read it.
anti-dialectics.co.uk/Why_al … nsical.htm
scroll down to ‘metaphysical theses’ and pick up where i left off. it gets better. well, in your case, worse. much worse.
No evidence! Mama mia!
I submit, words are evidence.
Experience when investigated leads to the conclusion that it cannot be its own cause because it is caused by something happening before
That is because the law of cause and effect [ at the classical level ] is specifically a temporal one and time only travels in one direction
But another way of looking at this is to class cause and effect as a single event rather than as two separate ones
And if the effect is so predictable that it is the only possible outcome then cause and effect cannot be separated
It is important to remember that there are no actual gaps in reality itself so everything that happens is effectively an uninterrupted sequence of causes and effects
Separating them from each other is to separate one aspect of reality from another aspect of it but it is more realistic to think of everything as being interconnected
I would also say that being is experience because being is existence and all experience is existence too
So from an ontological perspective these three words - being / experience / existence - are exactly the same
Being here does not refer to human being or any biological organism but simply the natural state of a thing whether it be an object or an organism
Being is the continuous situation in which discrete situations appear and disappear is therefore a true statement in relation to the above definition
One could also equally say either of the following is true as they mean exactly the same :
Experience is the continuous situation in which discrete situations appear and disappear /
Existence is the continuous situation in which discrete situations appear and disappear /
[ Experience is Existence / Existence is Experience ]
I disagree, I do understand Silhouettes position.
And you make a valid point about that later, a laziness in my formulation.
It is in the end “nonsensical” - but the sport is to prove that.
I think Ive proven quite well that what Silhouette says can not be formally denied in the traditional sense, but is still untrue.
Like I said before, he is smart. Only James and I have made a serious dent in his theory.
So this is where you have a point - Silhouette never says Experience is its own cause. He doesn’t say anything about causes, he might say they’re not actually there as experience is undivided - there is no thing which causes another thing. So cause isn’t a thing either.
So far so good, his theory makes sense up to quite a relevant level in the discipline of philosophy. But not in the volcanic forge of ontology, which I claim only came to fruition with Archimedes.
He demonstrated, more than that he formally proved, that the measure of what is is not merely in the mind, but in nature itself.
He made the first synthetic proof, and thus created theoretical physics, meaning physics as a form of math, meaning power.
I was actually quite aware of implying Silhouette did attribute cause whereas this wasn’t explicitly the case at all and he might even go on to refute it, but Ill grant you this point.
Not all truths follow as immediately from a statement. Say, for example, action equals -reaction.
That seems intuitive now, but it took a lot of physical experimentation to verify it.
But it was falsifiable. So we could find out if it is true or not by testing it.
We cant very easy test the premise that being equals experience.
This is the point of my challenge, whether you wish to examine it or not.
Ah okay you were in fact being a bit of a bookworm (I didn’t see the quotations as I was in reply mode) but, my dude, philosophy has had an inductive nature since the enlightenment and is never reducible to past thinkers. Nietzsche was the first to make this explicit by urging to surpass him, being a philosopher of the future, his Magnum Opus carrying the title of prelude - that was not merely about what is coming for mankind, but about a method of thinking which has been developed from the spark Machiavelli and then the grand arranger Francis Bacon onwards into Schopenhauer who produced the first inductive ontology meaning the first cohesion of ontology and epistemology.
Valuator logic is a technical means to employ this Schopenhauerian synthesis. Nietzsche stands between as an Existentialist, as basically a Sphinx.
Who is I?
I doesn’t exist as a subjective experience. Identity, this whole modern “don’t let others tell you who you are” is obviously a lie. Identity is identity of other people. Experiencially, that’s why it exists and how it makes sense. That’s why some people could be god kings. It doesn’t mean they thought they were god kings, but that that was what was made of them given the circumstances. A course, identity can be experienced in the sense that certain mechanisms were built for that partial identity, like genes, that can be inhabited experiencially. There is a reason we do not choose our own names.
Subjectivity is experienced. Or experience is subjective. Therefore there IS something that experiences that is not itself experience. This is true. The question for philosophy is: what is that thing? Valuator logic does a good job here, which is a praise that will only be understood by the go-deepers of philosophy. Nietzsche himself felt philosophy had better things to do with its time. Whatever it was, he felt, it was meant to be lived and not defined. Battle as the only form of consciousness that can fully encompass all the relevant elements.
He asked another question. He actually managed to make the subject of experience itself an experience.
A human self valuing in the terms you posit - cosmopolitan terms of inter-human meaning giving which, as despicable as it was, was the inevitable result of Athens’ maturity (it was the wine that was produced, sour or not) - includes every one he ever encounters to the extent that this encounter had an impact on either. In the Presocratic paradigm the selfvaluing relates not to other people but to nature and a select few minds (which as minds are like snowflakes, are never remotely comparable, comparable minds emerge only in large pools, in the cosmopolis) and hereby they relate to themselves in more expansive ways - I would argue that social meaning is the strongest meaning giver but not the kingly one. Kingship is in the stars, everything that matters about being a king is to understand the stars.
I don’t mean their patterns, I mean them.
This is the way humans properly understand each other - by their respective understanding of the stars. And only some people really attempt such magic as proper understanding.
Who is “I” - it is what resists the social, what offers up a different role any time something places it somewhere - it is simply the snake and the eagle, whichever is required to free itself of the great dragon Thou Shalt which is mankind in most of its form.
Cats, eagles, snakes…
I use Odin. Whatever of him is in me I use, to become more and more something resembling an “I”.
The path of the righteous man is indeed beset as the Book has it.
Ecmandu proven wrong - the Torah does not lie, at the very least not in this case.
It, too, is experience, of the densest material.
Experience made of self responsive experience, something of great importance. It was made important by the degree to which it valued.
This book, as do many books, discloses experience - it identifies experience.
Scientific virtues are particularly important for refining concepts and conceptual models in terms of discrete experience.
However, there is a crucial problem inherent to all methodologies: that they necessarily cannot arrive at themselves.
What this means with respect to science is that the scientific method was not first founded as a result of implementing the scientific method, as before the scientific method was founded it did not yet exist to found itself.
This is the kind of thing I’m referring to when I’m talking about circular logic.
It’s the same as for any logically valid statement, they require at least one given premise to apply logic to.
It’s the same as in set theory, for either the set of all sets that do not contain themselves leading to Russell’s Paradox, or for a solution to naive set theory such as by Zermelo and Fraenkel that cannot prove itself according to Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
There is a remainder - always and necessarily.
It’s the same problem as with tautologies not being valid definitions: definitions have to be in terms of something else circularly to have meaning relative to one another.
Given that some knowledge is better than other knowledge, we know for sure that there’s a fundamental standard against which all knowledge can be compared non-circularly and without any paradox.
This standard can only be singular in order for the standard to be non-circular, it has to precede everything plural to be non-circular - including all knowledge and scientific method, and it has to be undeniable and unavoidable.
Non-plurality is undivided unity: continuity. It has to encompass everything, or it’s leaving out some aspect of existence: it has to be all existence in its entirety in continuous unity.
It has to either exist, or for there to be no possible way to propose any kind of existence. In concrete rather than abstract terms: this is experience.
So you see, scientific virtues like everything else that’s discrete and definable come from something else more fundamental, and if there is to be any foundational basis for anything, “coming from something else more fundamental” must not reduce infinitely - there must be a singular starting point. So we see that there is no other possible foundation than Continuous Experience to found everything else - including scientific virtues. To hold Continuous Experience accountable to scientific virtues is either backwards or circular. Logically, there can be no other conclusion than Continuous Experience. Even illogically you can’t escape direct experience whilst retaining any grounds of existence at all - Continuous Experience exists unaccountably, and must do however you slice it up.
There is no dent in this theory, by James, yourself or anyone - there literally can’t be.
It’s not its own cause, continuity defies cause.
You can deconstruct it into causes, but then it’s something else: discrete experiences.
But even doing this, as explained above, you physically and logically cannot avoid the inevitability of Continuous Experience.
You’re really missing the points Im making. Its not about virues, it is about certainty. We can be absolutely certain that experience is not all there is. And yes, this certainty is also experience. This is what Im getting at; experience shows us certain things.
It is only through faith in the literal truth of language that we can pull of an argument like yours and convince ourselves.
But no one would bet his life on the premise that being equals experience. Not even you, I bet.
Let me make it very explicit and straightforward.
Your theory only works if we abstract “experience” (the word is abstraction) and make it itself a “discrete thing”; the word “experience”.
Both “experience” and “continuous experience” and even “non-discrete” are discrete things.
I didn’t want to go for this easy refutal as I found it more interesting to refute it through phenomenalist-positivist approach, which I did. But this also works.
This is very easy to refute: all living humans have a head, but not all beings who have a head are living humans.
Yes, experience is a form of being.
But it is proven that experience results from a non-experiencing being.
If we want to say that reality ends with our proof and does not include what is proven, then we are making those artificial breaks in existence which experientialism presumes to resolve.
Yes, existence is the situation in which experiences appear, but there is absolutely no argument to be made that existence is sufficiently defined as experience.