Realism vs. Idealism

Intelligence = processing speeds + pattern recognition and integration into cohesive mental models.

The rest is how imbeciles try to make their talent for basketball ro hammering into a form of genius.

One has to simply ask?
What separates man - homo sapient - from all other species?
What made this one species dominate them all?
They run faster, are stronger, more durable more flexible, yet dominated by a feeble creature with a large brain to mass ratio.

And yes, like a muscle, intelligence is inherited potential that can remain atrophied, and can regress if the stressors are not forcing ti to remain sharp.

Surreptitious75 wrote:

"Ego pertains to ones personality and can be completely separate from ones philosophical world view
A determinist is therefore not necessarily more ego driven than a free will advocate [ or vice versa ]

I cannot be certain of my significance on a human scale where no trace exists only on a universal one
But it is academic since all of human existence is merely ephemeral as we are all just passing through"

Maybe a metaphor can be used, as a distinction represented between the ego ideal and the ideal ego within the construction and deconstruction of reality. At the level of the metaphors, identity is represented within the patterns of recognition and creates a double mirror.

I call my metaphysical views;
Interactions & Interpretations.

An organism engages the real world via a medium - usually light or atmosphere, ro electromagnetism, in the case of touch.
This is when the first interpretation occurs, from stimuli to neural pulse to be transmitted to the brain where it is translated, once more, into feelings sensation, or abstraction, idea.
Much is lost in translation. It is a necessary part of processing data - it simplifie and generalizes.
We can never know reality absolutely, but only what is most probable.
The method has been successful, because our species has survived within the world.

Interactions imply attraction/repulsion, between patterned (ordered) or non-patterned (chaotic) energies.
Chaos is always repulsive, because it can never harmonize, which is a way of saying it can never attract and stabilize into complex forms, like particles.
Harmony indicates ana agreement of patterns - overcoming what repulsion disharmony is present.
Sometimes a third pattern can mitigate to stabilize two patterns in disharmony.

Energies can be conceptualized as vibrations/oscillations - see Superstring Theory.
Order is a repeating, predictable sequence of oscillation.
Here we can borrow from Heidegger’s terminology and say that the sequence is of possibility.
Possibility for what?
For interaction.
What is vibrating/oscillating?
Space = possibility. Probability would be matter/energy, order.
Dimensions are part of the sequence.
Light, for example, is a pattern (energy) which can interact it one dimension, diminishing the possibility of its interacting in all other dimensions. This is called movement/momentum, measured relative to other patterns, as speed.
Solidity, mass, like steel, can be understood as a pattern that can interact in multi-dimensional space/time. This sharing of its probable interactivity is perceived as solidity - vibration/oscillation speed slow.

But I digress.
The ideal is of the mind, the real is of the body, physical.
Mind interprets the real, usually using a medium, like light. The accuracy of its interpretation determines the success/failure of its subsequent actions and choices, based on this interpretation.

We can never know reality absolutely, and this is why anyone who claims to have solved the problem of reality is lying, and attempting to manipulate, ro to use the absence of absolutes to exploit need/desire in others.
We can only form the most probable interpretation and the most useful.

If we use language to reveal and not to conceal, then we may use the Greek term for ‘self’, ego to refer only to the conscious, lucid, part of self.
This makes Know Thyself a process that can never complete itself.

Self can be sued to refer to the identity starting at birth and ending at death, characterized by experiences - reactions and relating with reality in the fluctuating fluid present.
We may capitalize Self to represent the identity at is inherited from the parents - preceding birth.
we then have a triad:
ego–self–Self - to put it in temporal order: Self—self—ego.
A continuum of memories. Some inherited, genetically, and others adding to the previous via sensual interactivity.
Ego is the awakening to this continuum. Most associate it with the will, because the will is the focusing of the organism’s aggregate energies upon an objective.

Data can flow from exoteric and from esoteric sources, into the brain, via the nervous system.
The one-god has been associated with the mind, despite the body, because only the mind is free from natural order, and space/time limitations.
Abrahamism uses the mind to reject the body’s limitations.

My emphasis is on physis (nature), empiricism, with metaphysics only acting as a supportive element; a foundation.

However, that can’t be held unto the final set of self containing irreducibile elements for functional reasons, neceasarily, only contingently.

But why return to such uncertainty , where the objective aesthetic did not arise spontaneously .

sure, but what i did say about intelligence was sufficient to prove the point i was trying to make at that moment. anybody who likes to cite drops in intelligence in sample groups as some kind of evidence for a general decline in something like civilization, is blowing smoke. what usually follows is some statement like ‘but those stupid people are sheltered by an artificial environment… a once natural environment that would not tolerate them, one which man has interfered with to make accommodating to them.’ this line of nonsense is even more ambiguous. where does one draw the line between acceptable interference - when man’s control of the environment is good - and unacceptable interference - when man’s control of the environment is bad? in fact, you might find the same people pushing this idiotic argument at the front of the line to get a heart transplant, or not hesitating to accept a sizable loan from a bank to buy a house. shirley these things aren’t ‘natural’, are they? these are things man has designed… much like the things that make stupid people’s lives more easy, no? they must be artificial then. ah but these are ‘good’ instances of ‘artificial’, of man’s interference with what would otherwise be natural; a homeless man who dies because he can’t get a heart transplant. you see what i mean. trying to draw a ‘line’ here is almost as stupid as the argument itself, so you don’t bother mincing such nonsense.

but yes, had i gone on further to expand the definition of ‘intelligence’, i would have included the pattern recognition that you mention. that’s obvious enough. still though, that’s not all that it is, so i’d say your definition was rather incomplete as well. where is the pattern recognition in the foresight that you ought to park on the street instead of the sloped driveway the night before they call for snow? where is the pattern recognition in drawing the inference that groups that acquire a surplus of material goods tend to stay in one place rather than remain hunter-gatherers? where is the pattern recognition in the intuition that your spouse might be moody because their favorite team lost the superbowl? there re all kinds of intelligence that have next to nothing to do with recognizing spacial or causal patterns.

all this aside, the major premise is simple, and simply overlooked; there is no ‘ideal’ intelligence status, because environments change, thereby changing the demands made on the organism to survive. there may arise an environment in which some stroke of genius is perfectly useless (a philosophy classroom comes to mind)… and another in which some sonofabitch dumb as a styrofoam hammer can get along just fine.

Mamery is what pattern recognition relies upon.
Sense of self.
inheritance.

A pool of memories the individual can use to perceive pattern in its own and others experiences.

Trial and error is natural selection at tis basest most primal form.
Memory and the understanding ti may produce, adds a multiplying sophistication to probabilities.

Normally the idea/ideal proceeds from the real.
In Nihilism, all is inverted abstractly, linguistically, because is cannot be practically, physically.
Nihilism begins with the idea/ideal and then selectively attempts to incorporate reality into its contexts - into its ideology. If and when it cannot - which depends on the degree of its attempt to annihilate the real and replace it with tis ideal - it either rejects it as illusory or insignificant, or with a word redefinition defines it out of existence, or mystifies it and conceals it in mystifying prose and nonsensical met poetics - metaphors, allegories, insinuations, full of triggering symbols/words.

Moving from subjectivity towards objectivity is a movement from practical pragmatism towards impractical pragmatism; a movement towards the indifference of reality, necessitating a similar gradual indifference.
An unsustainable state, for humans, who, as organisms, must care and experience world as need/suffering.
A movement similar to that of light - increasing possibility of interactivity in one spatial-dimension, producing a decline of possibility in all other dimensions - speed.

There’s a difference between bringing language ‘down to earth’ and pulling it into the earth to bury it.
Nihilists want to bury it in allegory and romanticism, and idealism, (positive nihilists) or they want to convert it to meaninglessness and declare philosophy dead (pure nihilists).
If the world lacks absolute, create them with semiotics; if these fail to convince or to produce the desirable outcome, then settle for absolute negation as the one and only certainty.

Of course, with a middle of the road signification transvaluing both, with constructed objectives vested in probable outcomes. All ideals are realized to connect with all possible designs of possible modeling
are vested as usual in an anthropomorphiic medium

The eternal return to higher conscious manifestations of the ego

are signified as problems consisting of the signification of the particular that has to be overcome primarily, at least within the elementary participation mystique of two elements, creating sense of the binary signifier.

In the most reductive sense the idealization of a ideal manifestations of transcendental reality require a set of antithesis. Primal pre reflective visualization results in an apeothetic reduction toward nil , an absolute nihilization toward absurdity.

Not the eyes, language is a mirror into the soul, if by soul we mean the mind/body synthesis.
In times of decline, as the American Empire has now entered, the majority will be taken over by superstition, confusion, and desperation, reflected through their use and understanding of language.

We live, now, in a state of increasing desperation and degeneracy.
If words like male/female can lose their empirical meaning, and become terms of ideological contention, then how much easier it is to do so with more synthetic words, referring to more complex concepts?

The modern American infected mind lives in a state of linguistic confusion.
Words do not refer to biological real phenomena, but have become ideological - abstractions that replace empiricism with emotionalism.

Words have now been detached from empiricism and attached to abstractions, found in books, or in other minds - in subjective collectives.
Each adopting a specific jargon, reflecting their method of coping with reality - their nihilistic style.
They gather in ‘safe’ areas, i.e., areas free from predation, to casually regurgitate and share their shared method of self-medication - their shared coping jargon.

Although many of these misused and abused words have conventional meaning they are not grounded in empiricism, but intentionally maintained as ideologies, to be bought and sold on the market of ideas/ideals, where trends emerge and then gradually disappear and replaced by new fashion trends with their own lingo and their own style.

If not absolute power - omnipotence - then all will find parity ni shared powerlessness.
If omniscience is impossible, then we can find parity in uniform ignorance.

If not absolute oneness, then absolute void.
The either/or of Nihilistic binary dualisms.

Nihilism must reduce language to an ideology, referring to abstractions with minimal or no reference to an shared experienced world.
It must do so to sell its own ideological coping mechanism to those who share the same existential anxieties and genetic weaknesses, gathering them into cult-like groups, sharing the same jargon and the same obscurantism.

Some would rather render language empirically meaningless to reject a world that confronts and challenges their idealistic conception of themselves.

Male, female, race, love, morality, value, god etc.
All mystical words referring to occult realms, where the like-minded - those sharing the same psychology - can escape into.

Empirically grounding these terms will disarm them. This is why they fight, tooth and nail, those that try to return language to tis original utility, calling them names, like nazi, fascist, objectivist, or accusing them of an ulterior motive, of an emotional motive…fearing that their own may be exposed through their choice of words and how they chose to define them.
With no objective foundation, words become reflections of an esoteric foundation - where emotion replaces evidence and reason, and ego validates.
Quantities replace qualities, and ‘truth’ is measured by how many feeble minds an ideology can seduce and integrate into its obscurantism.

Vagueness maintaining an aura of all-inclusivity. None will be insulted or threatened; nobody will be turned away, if they show the willingness to submit to their common coping ideology.

Given any word, what does it mean to speak of its “empirical meaning”?

Example:
Male = biology, reproduction…appearance, behaviour…

First came the action, then the word.
Interactivity - how the specific phenomenon relates and interacts with other phenomena.

Nihilists use trivialities to obscure and declare empiricism an ideological construct.
In the case of the biological type ‘male’ they may use the fact that males dress differently I different cultures; some have bears, others do not; some use blue as the colour of maleness, others use black, or green, etc…
The use memes to convolute and to obscure…like garments covering the body may be used to declare the body inconsequential and what really matter sis the garment that covers it - fashion.

Abstraction usurps and precedes the physical. Idea before the real, not as an extension of it; not as a reference to it.
Logos preceding existence.

Nihilism inverts.
noumenon (idea/ideal) before phenomenon (apparent, present).
Language as world creating; language as world negating.
It’s range of effect determined by how many speak the same language, and interpret its meanings in the same way - cults of innocence, cults of inter-subjective meaning.
Reality is excluded or selectively referred to. idea is the standard, not the real.
Lacking empirical validation it finds support in collective needs and desires - shared weakness seeking relief, seeking salvation from need/suffering - the very experience of existing.

Except the principals have not appear to have shifted, particularly those that referred to underlying referential.
For instance meaning which arose within the meaning complex of ‘ideal’ , have references to other similar words, such as -idea, ideation, idealizationn, etc. When searching for the connections , it is of a modern school of thinking about the solution that the search culminated within the obscurity which Wittgenstein. GE Moore , Russel have indicated within their conceptual framework. This did start with the Viennese Circle, and the basic motives spelled out in Principia Mathematics and the Principia Ethica.

The reduction toward the literal interpretation within a domain of 'family resemblances, signifies a backward look, into and through differing semantic and logical levels of symbolism.
That this accords similar structural sharing with phonetical properties, do manifest in the English language literal accented shifts, particularly when large gaps are considered , say from middle English.
The idealizationsnare are not indicative to changes in the content of the phenome , or the concept beneath it, for idealizatio structurally remained the same in the architecture or configuration of ideal parts.

Within the ideal, the confifuratio consists of both, the phenomenal descriptive, which is the subsist of characteristics that the idea under lying the form is structured out of.
The modern destrictural process was actually discovered by Husserl , but reiterated by a more recent phenomenologist : Derrida.

That these philosophers connected with the epoche or the gap between the followers of Heidegger, who took a variable part with Nietzche, could be examined as the motive which passes through Heidegger’s temporal signification.

The ideal actually was deconstructed phenomenally bit not eidectically, and the analogous phenomenal reduction. had identifiable connections with their deconstructed counterparts.

However the buck stops there. Their is no underlying cognitive de-differentiation, the ideal that consists of identifiable elemwnts is untouched by resemblance, the very same elements in identification, the connection of phonetics as signifiers with prescriptive anthropomorphic characteristics, remain the same since the earliest days of western Hellenic culture.

What did change were the ethical approaches signifying the under lying shifts in mores.

The ideal beauty was primarily of an animus generated concept, where as in De anima, the spiritual awakening took an accompanied part.

The male and female gods were projected from within cross purposes representing the various ethical human concerns, and particularly, as they interfazed morals and structural basis of differans between the sexes.

For instance there were the same concerns with dressing and cross dressing, of homosexuality and heterosexuality, as they effected mores and were effected by them, as did later on.
What did change was not the idealizationn under lying the affective-subjective realizations , but the more by which such ideas were covered.

The Victorian period confiscated matters, and there was.maximum cover up of body parts that were most attrituble toward ‘descency’ whereas the most.subtle parts became more subtly and erotically metamorphosus.
The subtle matters.got the deeper the metaphor sank into the Romantic idiom.

If these processes are.recognized and recognized as vague and occult, then let those descriptions form these ideas with differing webs of meaning.

The underlying forms remain unchanged and uniform.