I’m too hyper…need something to calm myself.
meditate…hush,…focus…happy thoughts……
Shit…you are an imbecile.
WOOOOoow… Wooow…
Take it easy there…
Relax.
Calm…relax…okay…so camming your words are.
Makes me feel powerful…in control.
Sounds like the theory of natural selection of natural selection I brought up before. Experience responds to itself previous to consciousness, the unconscious experience embedded in psyche or “chaotic mental” is directly relative to that experience of which responds to itself. It is the archaic, primordial makings of all that is currently. The fabric of consciousness and reality.
The first beginning of natural selection is to do with the unconscious facets of reality, energy and matter in different forms/variables responding to each other, inevitably leading into the subconscious aspects, which is life, single cell and animalistic and other instinctual life, which then grew complex via experience and inverted, which is what consciousness is, now we have all three and the power of consciousness is to become aware of what is not directly experienced consciously but buried in psyche by the unconscious experiencing were attached to and come from, thus, there is no imagination due to this, only reality not confined to the present moment quite yet. Past or future tense.
When the subconscious aspects of reality began, so did the easily observable 2nd form of natural selection, which has to do with life, trial and error and survival of the fittest. Perhaps not always the fittest, but the more complex. Which Darwin discovered this 2nd natural selection regarding life, due to its being blatantly there.
Shhhhh…
Can I inhale?
i’m smoking a splif….
Hey Artimas,
Note that I did not so much propose a model though as Im making an observation using elementary logic to ground Silhouette’s argument in empiricism - erm, experience. Experience must relate to itself to exist.
Silhouette denies the existence of discrete causes (even using discrete causes to deny them), so it is not fertile to engage him in that direction, but I figured a thinker should at least be able to recognize that experience, when we wish to envision it as a continuum, must be responding to itself - as responsiveness is what it is.
What is experience besides responsiveness?
Natural selection is a logic only established after the fact - it simply observes that what has been selected has been selected.
No notion of life is required for this - Atoms too are product of natural selection.
Im no sure it is inevitable, other than that indeed it happened - why do you say that?
In order to make the subconscious conscious, we must “identify it as experience”.
Check this out, this is, if I say so myself, a very good text I wrote early on after having developed VO.
beforethelight.forumotion.com/t3 … experience
This text too has, I believe, been “stolen” and used by academics. Except it isn’t theft, I put it out there for free because to be stolen from as a thinker is the greatest reward.
Better than being paid to say some trivial shit with no consequences.
Listen though “survival of the fittest” is a circular term which doesn’t have is origin with Darwin, but with his readers. “Survival of the fittest to survive”.
Certainly complexity in itself is rarely an asset - look at the Neanderthal who had a much more complex cognitive process who gave way to Homo sapiens - in general, look at the basic human suff that pervades in the world - very simplistic hearts and minds, simple value structures, and it really takes formidable strength in complexity to get anywhere in this world; also, people with complex minds tend to not procreate as easily as people with very basic minds. Except where the complex mind has a particular sharpness about it, a way to use the complexity to outwit or outmatch the others.
This is the source of your self-aggrandizing psychosis.
This is why you chose to use ‘value’ when energy sufficed…to connect ti to Nietzsche. Because you covet his influence…the effect he had on you. You want to have that effect.
This is why you will fail. This level of derangement can go nowhere.
Know Thyself, inflated into a balloon, just begging to be popped.
I bet you see sings of your self-importance every day, and that you’ve had mystical experiences that prove, to you, that you are ‘gifted’, anointed by fate.
Someone who came to change the world…for the better.
A complex of Messiah.
I have already succeeded, you dimwit.
You simply declare, imbecile.
You state, and then use poetics to imply depth.
You failed…over and over. You live in your head.
Convincing, seducing, manipulating, a few morons you found on-line is no great feat.
VO is void of content. It is a word-ploy, pretending to be more than it is.
Energy sufficed, but you had to connect it to Nietzsche, and gain some of his ‘magic’.
This weakness is what makes you fail…despite what you tell yourself.
I don’t deny the existence of discrete causes - I deny their existence at a fundamental level, but not their subsequent possible existence. Discrete causes are contingent, but not necessary. Is that clearer? All meaning in everything I say is in terms of discrete experiences, because it is in terms of knowledge, words, dissected experience into concepts and reconnected via conceptual models - of course discrete causes are involved.
The point is whether I approach it from this point or from the point of direct observation, Continuous Experience is fundamental. At that level, there are no discrete causes. At the level of discrete experience there are discrete causes.
This whole “responsiveness” thing just sounds like it’s either premised on dissected experience, for some thing to be responsive to something else, or it’s tautologically meaningless to say that it’s responsive to itself.
You mean the latter, I assume, but whatever way you mean it - it’s just another example of what I’m repeatedly pointing out about Epistemology: unless you have an unavoidable axiom it’s all circular/tautological/baseless.
My point remains, as it ever was, that “Continuous Experience” is a discrete notion, as is “Experience”.
There is nothing continuous or unbroken about it.
The same goes for your argument. It is built on discrete terms.
Im a lot more skeptical than you are, less eager to arrive at a conclusion - I would never trust such roads as youve taken.
How is it tautologically meaningless?
Do you mean its obviously true?
I agree that it is true, and not that this truth is meaningless, especially since you are claiming that it is not true.
That means all you say here is circular, tautological, baseless - since you didn’t use any axiom to arrive at your belief, but merely this belief itself. It is as circular as can be.
A word does not equal what it is meant to refer to. Thus: abstraction always precedes argument.
You are making an honorable mistake similar to the presumption behind the work of the earlier Wittgenstein.
The mistake is to derive “Continuous” from your own private notion of “Experience” and then treat it as if you started out with it.
The caveat with experientialism is that it allows its believer to ignore whatever he likes to ignore and convince himself “what I don’t experience doesn’t exist”.
With VO it is the other way around more or less -the more truth you ignore, the less you exist. And thats how it really is.
Tautologies:
- “A cat is a cat”. What does this statement teach you? What is a cat now that you didn’t know before? Is anything changed about cats or your knowledge of cats as a result of this statement?
It’s obviously true that a cat is a cat, but no knowledge comes from it. No progression has been made, nothing has been advanced or developed.
The same goes for “a cat is itself”. - “A cat is to itself” adds the term “to”, which implicitly imposes direction e.g. “from A to B”.
But what is A “from” such that something can thus arrive “to” B? Well in this case, it’s the “from” a cat “to” a cat (the same cat). But what direction has the cat or anything else “gone” from itself to itself? What direction is “from A to A”?
No direction? Perhaps away from the cat (implying the existence of “not cat”) and then back to the cat? Here “to” implicitly imposes both self and other. - “A cat is responsive to itself” adds the verb “to respond”: so the cat is doing something. What is it doing when it responds? You respond to a message, right? What is the message?
Communicating to yourself does nothing because the information that left you arrives back to you as it was before it left.
(Obviously there are further nuances upon consideration of the human psyche, e.g. talking to yourself can affirm a notion in your mind even though no extra information has been given or taken. But objectively no information has been gained or lost). - “Experience is responsive to itself” changes the discrete object of “cat” to a less distinctly defined and more broadly encompassing notion - perhaps if you’re referring to Continuous Experience then it’s maximally broad and minimally distinctly defined because it’s everything, unbroken.
And yet:
We have a direction “to” that went nowhere,
We have an action “respond” that gained/lost nothing, and
We don’t even have a specific thing from which nothing went nowhere, saying nothing…
A full deconstruction thoroughly shows your statement to be meaningless. As to whether it’s “true”? It’s not even internally consistent, as there is no non-experience to allow direction “to” experience (or away from it) and Continuous Experience is unbroken so no message can truthfully be abstracted from it (breaking it down into useful concepts to communicate).
So it would have been better for me to call it the opposite of a tautology: “a contradiction”. What I meant by tautology is that what you’re saying is circular, adding nothing: similar to saying “given value, therefore value”, or “nobody wants their consent violated”: it says nothing, goes nowhere, and does nothing. The net effect is of a tautology, but you’re right: “Experience is responsive to itself” isn’t even tautological because it’s obviously not true.
But aside from truth: to “utility”. If you’re talking about “discrete experiences”, then you can talk about things being responsive to themselves as you’ve already dissected continuity.
Yet even then, where does the direction of “to” go, just to come back to itself? What is gained or lost from being responded to when the source and destination of the message is the same place? The objection stands even in terms of utility, as well as in terms of truth.
My argument “from” discrete experiences “to” Continous Experience is built on discrete terms - I’ve never denied that. In fact I acknowledged the fundamental issue of using words to communicate “Continuous Experience” because doing so will necessarily be in terms of discrete experiences: there is no other option for meaningful communication than the use of discrete experiences. But then I need merely draw your attention to what’s going on to prove “Continuous Experience” to you - the discrete terms serve only to approach the issue from the other direction. Using discrete terms just highlights the unresolvable remainder of a grounded (and not circular or baseless) Epistemology requiring the direct axiom (that is Continuous Experience), which is evident simply through existing.
You keep making the criticism that the wrong tools (discrete experiences) make what you’re using the tools on (Continuous Experience) invalid. Discrete tools aren’t what make Continuous Experience valid - existence in its evident concrete form directly makes Continuous Experience valid. The fact that using the wrong tools also highlights the same thing only rounds out the whole Epistemology: completing its legitimacy via both approaches.
So from the above, the “axiom” is the direct concrete symptom of simply existing. Its existence isn’t down to some derivation in terms of discrete experiences: that would be circular. Its derivation in terms of discrete experiences is problematic through its own form, but it still comes back to the same thing. That’s how you know it’s correct: it’s inevitable from using either a direct or any problematic indirect approach.
“A word does not equal what it is meant to refer to” is a theme I’ve been supporting consistently throughout my posts on this forum, but maybe not ones with you, I can’t be sure.
But I’ve been doing so using the terms of de Saussure rather than in reference to Wittgenstein: “signifers” and the “signfied”.
So I’ve been making no such mistakes, in fact I’ve been saying exactly that words are not what they refer to - that’s the whole point of why Continuous Experience is directly what it is and not the discrete words of “Continuous” and “Experience”. The words are the signifiers, and Continuous Experience is what is signified. The signified is directly unavoidable whether words are used or not: it’s existent completely independent of any words used to signify it. Using signifier words just happens to come to the same conclusion.
My own private notion of “Experience” requires first that it’s mine, which fundamentally it isn’t as it’s continuous. There is no “me”, or “other” or any concept dissected from Continuous Experience “in” Continuous Experience. Such notions of “private” require it’s dissected first, into discrete experiences. Continuous Experience is directly the starting point as it’s the concrete form of existence as a whole. “My own private experience” requires that it’s broken down first, and my denial that this is the starting point is the whole point. Fundamentally it’s not mine, nor anyone’s - it just “is”.
See you keep saying you understand Experientialism and you still come out with things like Experientialism saying “what I don’t experience doesn’t exist”.
No, Experientialism says that experience exists as the concrete form of existence - that anything that can be said to have any existence necessarily has to be able to take the form of experience.
What “I” experience has nothing to do with Continuous Experience at all, and even in terms of discrete experiences, “I” is a dubious enough term as it is. Even given “I” in terms of discrete experiences, experientially the “I” must be divided from something else in order to come into its own discrete existence - relative to some “other”: Continuous Experience divides the “I” from something else. To say only the “I” exists in terms of discrete experiences is like saying only 1 side of a coin exists - it’s why Solipsism must resolve into Experientialism in order to become consistent with itself. So the Solipsism of which you’re accusing me is invalid to both Continuous Experience and discrete experiences.
S - thanks for the reply. I hope you don’t take offence at my being rather economical in response - these are points which can be made without a lot of fuss.
That is indeed your axiomatic assertion on which all the rest you claim relies. And as Ive explained in quite a number of ways now, I see this as pertinently false.
This certainly was not included in you 2014 rendering - I distinctly remember presenting this formulation of “anything which can be said to exist is self-valuing and valuing in terms of self-valuing” against the more monolithic statement of “existence is continuous experience”.
I still do not agree that all that can be said must take the form of experience, as a computer can also say things.
But to be clear, do you reject the notion that continuous experience equals existence?
Then how did you make the observation? Or did the observation make “it-self”?
By being continuous?
How is that possible?
No offense taken at all.
I’m just responding to whatever queries you have, I don’t require an intricate breakdown of the minutae of every single thing I’ve said. Worry not.
Okay.
I mean, I don’t know exactly how it can be pertinently false that Continuous Experience is not directly evident. It’s there without gaps, and when experience isn’t there, there is no not-experience…
Is experience not there to you, without gaps, directly and immediately? No discrete dissection necessary, or any descriptive verbal formulation required - just “there” regardless?
I still stand by “existence is continuous experience”, which can be falsely broken down mentally into discrete experiences for the sake of utility. It’s still Continuous Experience that’s existing, it’s just being conceptualised as discrete.
Surely it then follows logically “that anything that can be said to have any existence necessarily has to be able to take the form of experience” because there is no not-experience that can be said to have any existence? Continuous Experience covers everything: all of existence in its concrete form. There is nothing else that can be said to have existence without being able to take that form of experience.
A computer can say things, sure. Saying things takes the form of experience. Interpreting the sounds/words as useful meaningful communication requires breaking this experience down into discrete terms. It’s still Continuous Experience, but being mentally conceived as a message, which not incidentally is also an experience to understand.
So no, I don’t reject the notion that Continuous Experience equals existence in its concrete form.
You see how you’re instinctively throwing in the “you” into “you make the observation”? That’s secondary - it requires discrete experience. Primarily it’s just (Continuous) Experience as existence in its concrete form. Understanding experience as a subject/object interaction comes after that. I know it’s dumb and hippie to suggest, but “being one with everything” is perfectly possible: the dissolution of the ego into something more primal. Is this not something “you’ve” ever experienced, or not been aware that “you’ve” ever experienced? Note that I only use words here like “you” for utility - they allow more specific communication of knowledge via discrete words to denote discrete concepts. But if you’ve ever knowingly experienced what I’m talking about, you’ll realise that at the time there was no “you”. Yet even if you’ve never experienced this, there’s still no “I” or “you” because there’s no gap to separate Experience, and there’s no non-experience to give existence to “subjects” that allegedly “do the experiencing without being experienced”. An “experiencer” conceptually separates from the “experienced”, thereby falling into the territory of non-experience and thus non-existence. There’s no grounds to give the “unexperiencable” any existence: self is an illusion, but then all discreteness of experience is. Any alleged experiencing of one’s self as an experiencer requires that the experiencer both conceptually retreat to experience itself and remain conceptually where it was to be experienced simultaneously, which is a conceptual contradiction. There is no “you” or “I”: a radical re-conception of reality for sure, which loses out on a certain degree of utility, but at least it’s a more consistent re-conception.
I think I must have mis-typed as this doesn’t make sense to me either. Discrete experiences allow the “I” to be conceptually divided from something else - my point was that Solipsism has to resolve into Experientialism because “I” implies “not I” due to the nature of “I” having been dissected out of Continuous Experience into terms of discrete experiences. Hopefully that wording makes better sense.
S - Thank you for your dignified approach. You are among the very few self-respecting individuals left in this place.
I add this intro post scriptum - I believe I have made a conclusive set of arguments. I don’t doubt, of course, that we will continue to disagree.
I will be more skeptical. Let me ask you a question.
What is “experience”?
I do not seem relate to your rendering of it - we use the term differently. Can you define it?
I do not relate to this concept. I do not understand “anything that can be said to have any existence necessarily has to be able to take the form of experience” as a valid statement.
I disagree that by indicating a thing, that thing “takes on the form of experience”.
There is rather a new thing; the experience of the thing.
We understand the term “experience” in different ways.
A computer can say things, sure. Saying things takes the form of experience. Interpreting the sounds/words as useful meaningful communication requires breaking this experience down into discrete terms. It’s still Continuous Experience, but being mentally conceived as a message, which not incidentally is also an experience to understand.
So no, I don’t reject the notion that Continuous Experience equals existence in its concrete form.
[/quote]
This would presume that, when we give a computer the command to speak and walk out of the room, it doesn’t speak.
The old question, if a tree falls where no one hears or sees it fall, does it really fall?
I say yes, you say no.
You see how you’re instinctively throwing in the “you” into “you make the observation”? That’s secondary - it requires discrete experience.
[/quote]
Which is the only form experience I have any knowledge of.
I do not understand (experience) the concept of experience otherwise.
This you have said before, but given no evidence of.
Not only do they allow more specific communication of knowledge - they allow communication of knowledge ueberhaupt. There is no other way of communicating knowledge - you can not prove otherwise.
Thus, all that can be said to exist is discrete.
The sentence “I” realize that there is no “I” is evidently a contradiction.
What you say about what can be said contradicts what you say by your very saying it.
Thus, all that can be said to exist is discrete.
Hereby my formal argument is concluded.
I will indulge the following informally;
I am very familiar with Nirvana and the Void, and the dissolution of self.
But this does not apply to ontology. Its a mind-state - a discrete experience, discontinuous with other mind states.
It is still “I” who experiences the absence of the ego.
A paradox. Or a contradiction. Or an illusion.
It would appear that the experience of the “I” being revealed an illusion is itself an illusion.
What you are attempting to say can not be said. Hence, the koan. One can poetically convey, but not logically define continuous experience. Thus it is mysticism, and not philosophy.
You’ve made a valiant attempt of it though, more so than any Ive encountered before.
Salute!
FC
Let me begin with areas where there is agreement between us.
Traditionally I have been overtly anti-mysticism, but this thread has helped highlight for me a necessity for a certain specific mysticism - which is what I have been covering through my argument about a founded Ontology that precedes Epistemology: there must “be” before anything can “be known”, requiring that the foundation of a philosophy must necessarily be “pre-known” i.e. mysterious.
So I guess I have you to thank for that: my thanks.
It’s within this frame that I see “Nirvana and the Void, and the dissolution of self” as the original default - or a subsequent revision of the default following the adopted mind-state of discrete experience that we all learn as “second nature”, as a result of its successful physical and social utility through which we are all brought up and educated. “The ‘I’ who experiences the absence of the ego” being a contradiction actually backs up this view through the solution that rejects the notion of “I” as fundamental. Your interpretation is of course that the contradiction invalidates “the absence of the ego”. The difference is how we differently interpret the premises of the contradiction:
- Your major premise is that the “I” that experiences as a general statement, and your minor premise is that any instance of absence of ego contradicts this as a specific statement, therefore the minor premise must be rejected.
- My major premise, which I derive from the lack of gaps in experience and the impossibility of the subject, is the absence of ego. My minor premise is that the “I” can be extracted from the Continuous Experience that derives my major premise as the specific rather than the general case. Therefore the minor premise must be rejected.
As you can see my interpretation is an inversion of yours, even though our respective logic to reject the minor premise in each case is logically valid. It’s therefore an issue of soundness.
From what I can gather, your premise that the “I” experiences is self-evident. The purpose of my arguments to reject “the subject” and “gaps in experience” is to challenge the given of this interpretation as self-evident, and replace it with the notion that Continuous Experience is self-evident. That’s the foundation of my inversion, and I presume it to be the foundation of our disagreement.
I agree that your phrasing presents an evident contradiction, however this is why I reject the phrasing rather than the contradictory notion implied by the statement: an objection to soundness rather than validity. You appear happy to reject the statement on the grounds of validity alone, and I disagree with this.
I regard “I realise that” to be unnecessary to the statement that “there is no I”.
“I realise that” appears to serve only the function of inserting the expected subject into the sentence, which seems to me to be merely contingent upon social conventions about grammar (utility) rather than a necessity about reality (truth). You will remember that I distinguish between the two.
At this point, I will of course refer you back to my arguments about the impossibility of “the subject” and “fundamental gaps in experience” to distinguish a subject from anything else (object(s)).
I agree that all that can be said to exist is discrete (at least literally and consistently), but my contention is that the useful tools of “saying” are insufficient as arbiters of truth. Again with my distinction.
“Saying” is predicated upon experience: it is an experience, in terms of experience, about experience - and requires a separation of “signifier” and “signified”, and a socially agreed upon association between the two. There is a void (a gap) between the subject and object of any “saying”, only minimised in part by onomatopoeia. Even for the word “word”, which would seem to come close to bridging this gap, it only has real meaning relative to other words where there this “gap” isn’t simply between the thing and itself, where instead meaning is the means to connect the signifier with a different signified. Otherwise it is tautologous and meaningless.
So in this way, “a word is never what it means” is exactly why the useful tools of “saying” are insufficient as arbiters of truth. And yet they are requisite for communicating knowledge, so indeed - without their use you cannot prove anything, as “proof” is a function of communicating knowledge. Herein is the meaning of the distinction between truth and utility. This leaves us with the fundamental problem of Epistemology: that utility is insufficient to ground truth.
This is why knowledge is particularly good at ruling things out and particularly bad at proving the existence of anything. The truth-shaped hole left by utility is our only grounds to reach it, other than the self-evident that takes the concrete form of experience.
So now that I’ve shown the complications of using words to define something (especially when such a thing is “all” and therefore either undefinable or meaninglessly/tautologously “definable”), you have to take my words (or anyone’s words) as the hole that they leave Epistemologically, in order to reach the Ontological at a pure level. I can only say that experience is a good “word” to denote the “all” that exists concretely. Such a definition is entirely insufficient using words, and is tautologous, but it’s the best I can say to the ends of “just experience” (which you will inevitably be doing anyway - if you didn’t, there would be no grounds for you to propose the existence of anything at all). I simply ask: “exist”, and note the quality of your existence: experience.
This is why I present the contrary question: how can you posit the existence of anything at all without referring to experience?
Considering that you can’t say anything, nor even “experience” anything of existence on a personal pre-verbal level without experience, this is what shows it to be fundamental. As such, you can’t say anything about existence without it taking the form of experience. This translates into “anything that can be said to have any existence necessarily has to be able to take the form of experience”.
I agree - you understand experience in terms only of discrete experiences. Yet you also communicate knowledge of “Nirvana and the Void, and the dissolution of self”.
Do you agree that words are somewhat insufficient to communicate knowledge of “Nirvana and the Void, and the dissolution of self”?
I think we understand experience in terms of “discrete experiences” the same, so your issue would solely be with “Continuous Experience”, no?
When I explain my argument that there are no gaps in experience and there is no subject, that’s supposed to be my evidence.
The answer to this age-old dilemma is in how you define “speak” for the unattended computer, or “make a sound/really fall” for the trees example.
I don’t say no or yes. I say “frame the question correctly”.
This is the Jakob I remember. Welcome back. And to you in return.